Two Serpents Rise

16

Serpents covered the gallery wall, asps and vipers, hooded cobras, slender finger-wide coral snakes and bulge-bellied anacondas. Writhing, they ate each other.

Caleb watched close up, his nose inches from rippling scales. A diamondback rattler devoured a garden snake; a fat flat-headed serpent from the jungles of southern Kath ingested the rattler’s tail in turn. Hisses filled his ears.

“Grotesque,” he said, and shivered. “I don’t know what you see in Sam’s work.”

“Grotesquerie,” Teo said from behind him.

“That’s what I said.”

“Not what I meant. That’s the name of the piece. Urban Grotesquerie.”

“I see where it comes from. This is sick.” The rattlesnake wriggled forward, as if by devouring prey it might escape the jaws behind.

“It’s art. If you’re looking at it, it’s working.”

Caleb turned away.

Teo’s gallery was floored in varnished wood and lit by tall windows facing south. Sam’s work hung on the white walls: twisted, inhuman creations, sculptures of men devouring the entrails of other men in a cannibalistic network, bas reliefs of cities that had never been and would never be. On the exhibition’s opening night three weeks before, as Teo chatted up donors, buyers, and benefactors, Caleb had spent twenty minutes staring at the only thing on the walls that qualified, as far as he was concerned, as a painting: an image of two triangles interlaced, in oils on unfinished canvas.

Those triangles haunted his sleep for ten days afterward, towering yet so small he could hold them in his palm. In dreams he tumbled into that painting, his soul stretched long and thin—a thread in rough canvas. Around him he heard other threads, men, women, children, falling forever and screaming as they fell.

Teo sat beside a small table upon which rested an open bottle of champagne and Caleb’s empty glass. She drank from her own glass, and smiled as she swallowed. Caleb poured more wine, and offered Teo the last drops, which she refused—“You need good fortune more than I do!” He sat down facing her.

“To fortune,” he murmured. They touched glasses and drank together. He watched her as she watched the snakes. A trick of Craft projected their hisses out into the room, so that no matter how Caleb shifted or where he stood, serpents seemed to hover at his back, forked tongues flicking the saddle ridge of his ear. “That’s uncomfortable,” he said, swatting at empty air.

“It’s art,” she repeated. “Supposed to be uncomfortable. Makes you think.”

“Makes me think about getting eaten by snakes. I saw a snake eat a deer once, out in the Badlands. The deer had been paralyzed, maybe stung by the Scorpionkind or something. This big viper wriggled out of a hole, wrapped the deer up, killed it, and ate it. Some of my nightmares look like that.”

“What do the other ones look like?”

He pointed at the wall of serpents.

“This doesn’t speak to you? Thousands of snakes, pressed so close together they have to kill one another to eat?”

“You think she’s talking about the city.”

“Of course she’s talking about the city.”

“It’s different.”

“How, exactly?”

“Well. The snakes eat one another,” he said, but when she smiled at that he tried again. “People in Dresediel Lex aren’t so close together,” but that was a difference of degree, and he wanted a difference of kind. “Gods, I don’t know. That, though”—he waved vaguely at the wall of snakes—“isn’t everything. What about compassion? Love?”

“We get those all the time from cheap romances. Only a true artist can show us this.”

“You don’t believe the world is that bleak any more than I do.”

“I don’t have to agree with Sam to like her work.”

“Especially if you’re sleeping with her.”

“Exactly.” Teo sipped champagne. “Speaking of which, how is love working out for you so far?”

He looked away from her. “Love has nothing to do with Mal.”

“The hell it doesn’t. Love, lust, whatever you want to call it. Why else would you almost die trying to protect her?”

He grimaced, and remembered the agony of healing. “To the King in Red.”

“To Lord Kopil,” Teo said with a jaunty toast to Caleb and the snakes. “Long may he burden my soul with unearned thaums.”

“The Heartstone bonus came through this week, I see.”

She tapped the curved Iskari lettering on the champagne bottle. “You think I’d pay for a Hospitalier ’83 on my salary?” Despite her family’s wealth, Teo tried to live within her personal means. The soulstuff her parents pressed on her, she threw into the collection, curation, purchase and sale of art. “The bonus cleared last week. You haven’t seen your share?”

“Not yet. Not that I’m hurting for thaums after winning our bet.”

“You’re lucky I’m the trusting type. I never saw evidence of your victory.”

“To your unwarranted faith in my honesty.” He drank, and closed his eyes, and the serpents’ hisses became the sound of steam in the cave beneath the world, the groan of shifting rock as Aquel and Achal tossed in their sleep. “I’m worried about this deal.”

“We’ve done seven months’ due diligence. The King in Red wanted every avenue checked. You personally reread whole sections of that contract.”

“I did. Sections. The thing is seventy thousand pages long. They folded space to fit it in one conference room for the signing. It’s not even all on paper: some paragraphs are carved on stone plinths, some on the pyramid itself. Nothing that complex is safe.”

“Every morning you walk into your bathroom, put your hand to the tap, and fresh water flows out, courtesy of Red King Consolidated. That’s a complicated system, and you trust it daily.”

“Pipes, filters, pumps I understand. It’s easy to tell when they’re broken. The Heartstone deal isn’t about water. It’s about Craft: power pledged on the promise of more power, demonic pacts, bargains with beings beyond our reality. Some of its clauses depend on the going price of souls in the Abyss.” An exaggeration; he’d been to some of the nearer hells on business trips, but their denizens did not seem so interested in the soul trade as stories claimed. “The structures of Craft involved are so complex even their creators barely understand them. We’ve fixed all the problems we can find—it’s the problems we can’t that worry me.”

“That’s Sam’s point.” Teo waved at the snakes on the wall. “This city is stranger and more alien than we can conceive—snakes wriggling over one another, feeding on one another.” She interwove her fingers and twitched them.

“Don’t remind me.”

“Think about it this way,” she said. “Look at the snakes again.”

“No.”

“Do it.”

They slithered, devouring but never satisfied: a twist of Craft allowed the serpents being eaten to writhe out of their predators’ gullets unscathed, only to be consumed again.

“I’m looking.”

“Imagine you were a snake.”

“I’d rather not. Especially in this context.”

“Imagine you were a snake,” she repeated, and he did. He wound over and around himself, forever hungry, consuming as he consumed, his world a matrix of pain and fear. “All you see are snakes, and the world makes no sense at all. But from a distance we see the pattern of which the individual snake is only a piece.”

“So you think I should stop worrying about the fact that I can’t see how Heartstone fits together?”

“I think you should realize that the world isn’t all cut to your scale. Sam’s gallery openings and premieres and patrons keep these serpents alive, even though their little snaky brains can’t comprehend that stuff. RKC, Heartstone, they’re so big they might as well be gods. We shouldn’t expect to understand them entirely.”

“What about the King in Red? Or Alaxic? Do you think they comprehend what they’re doing?”

“They’re Deathless Kings. Their minds aren’t bound by brains and fleshy bits anymore. Maybe they think differently from the rest of us.”

He remembered a small picture in a silver frame, and the way the King in Red leaned against his desk, shoulders slumped and head bowed. “Maybe.” Teo glanced at him, curious, but whatever she wanted to ask, she changed her mind.

“Regardless,” she said. “May more deals like Heartstone leave us rich in soulstuff and good wine.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Caleb said. On the wall, vipers hissed in a reptilian hell.

17

When Caleb and Teo reached the pyramid at 667 Sansilva, the giant auditorium was already crowded with RKC employees in work robes and formal dress. Snakelings wound about the pillars that supported the balcony, long bodies glistening. Humans, skeletons, and well-preserved zombies, a scattering of Scorpionkind, brass giants bearing the vision-gems of distant Craftsmen, and all the other rabble of RKC crowded in the seats and aisles.

Caleb and Teo shouldered between a golem and a paunchy balding man in a skullcap. The speeches had begun; they could not see the stage, but the vaulted ceiling threw the King in Red’s voice down upon them.

“The last three months,” Kopil said, “have been a time of trial. Together we spilled gallons of ink and blood. Together we moved mountains. Together we suffered grueling meetings in the Abyss.” The crowd murmured assent. Teo had ventured into the Abyss herself during the negotiations, painted in henna and silver wards against the odd intelligences that lived there. “Heartstone Holdings has remade the Craft of dousing and well-drilling in its own image. An analyst at Traeger Matins Laud once suggested that Heartstone might supplant us as provider of water to this city. For a few years, I almost believed they could do it.”

The King in Red pitched that line as a joke, and was rewarded by a few uneasy chuckles. Shedding the confines of the flesh had not improved Kopil’s sense of humor, but people laughed anyway. Vast power made even bad jokes funny.

Caleb squeezed past a young woman with blue skin and a zombie carrying a brain in a bubbling jar.

“We decided that together we would be greater than either of us apart. Red King Consolidated, of which we are all limbs”—the young woman with blue skin touched her forehead, throat, and heart, as did others scattered through the crowd—“began the dance of union with Heartstone Holdings. Today, we achieve our goal. The contract is signed, the last sigil graven into stone. Red King Consolidated and Heartstone will be one.”

A round of applause began, perhaps spontaneously or perhaps a junior executive’s attempt to curry favor. Either way, it spread from the front rows through the auditorium. The King in Red was watching. No one wanted to be the only person not to clap.

“I present Alaxic, Chairman of Heartstone, and his Chief Craftswoman Ms. Kekapania, to seal the pact between our firms.”

Caleb shouldered at last to the front of the standing crowd, stopped, and stared. Teo tripped and fell into his back, but he did not notice.

Three hundred feet away, the King in Red commanded center stage, his robe bloody, his arms outstretched. Crimson sparks burned from his eye sockets. Shadow cloaked Alaxic beside him.

Mal stood between them.

She wore a charcoal suit, not a cliff runner’s leathers, but the cant of her chin and the defiance in her gaze had not changed. Her short hair swept up and back from her head in frozen waves. She looked upon Red King Consolidated, and smiled.

“Mal,” Caleb said, and realized that he had spoken out loud, in the silent auditorium. Kopil paused, and searched the audience for the speaker. Mal’s smile widened. Had she heard? Did she recognize his voice?

“Malina Kekapania,” said the King in Red, “has been my primary liaison with Alaxic throughout this process.”

The old man raised his head and moved papery lips. His voice passed over the audience like crumbling windblown leaves. “My blood is shed upon the contract, and signing it, I am quit of Heartstone Holdings.” He bared long white teeth in a ghastly grimace of what Caleb hoped was pleasure. “Ms. Kekapania will seal the bargain in my stead.” He clutched his hands behind his back, retreated a step, and watched the stage with glittering black eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Teo whispered.

“That’s her.”

“Her who?”

“Mal.”

“Some of you,” Mal said, to Caleb and to the crowd, “may be surprised to see us here.”

No kidding, Caleb thought.

“This deal,” she continued, “has hung for months on technicalities and minor disagreements, but its end was never in doubt. Heartstone prides herself on knowing what she wants. The question we’ve had through these negotiations has always been: what can we do together?” Her eyes scoured the room. “Now we’re here. What’s next is up to us.”

“Yes,” Kopil said. Caleb’s mouth formed the same word.

The light faded, and Caleb’s mind opened to the universe. He fell a hundred stories and did not smash or splatter when he hit bottom, but spread like a drop of water through thin cloth.

A silver-blue gossamer net connected the audience. Caleb breathed, and two thousand pairs of lungs breathed with him. Two thousand hearts beat in two thousand breasts.

He sank into the ocean of Red King Consolidated. Blood rushed in his veins and water rushed in pipes under the desert. Lightning danced down his nerves, crackled along glyph lines across the city. Octopus arms of Craft wove through sea and stone, binding RKC to Deathless Kings and giant Concerns in cities across continents and oceans: to Alt Coulumb, to Shikaw and Regis, to the metropolitan sprawls of the Shining Empire, the mines of Koschei, the gear-bound desert cities of King Clock.

The King in Red shone crimson. A million contracts wove through the iron bars of his spirit, and bound him. Caleb could not see where his soul ended and RKC began.

Mal stood transfigured, a figure of adamant edged with razor blades. Space bent with her breath.

In the dark behind them both, Alaxic lurked half-visible, avuncular ghost to their glory.

The world doubled: Caleb saw the King in Red on stage, doll-sized by distance, a puppet of the cords that bound him, and saw himself also through the King in Red’s eyes, caught in webs of silver. They were all at once themselves and not themselves, human and Deathless King, mortal and immortal, bound by dread pact and mystic pledge.

The King in Red turned to Mal, the blazing anchor of the world.

“I stand embodied representative for Red King Consolidated, as majority owner of my soul and Chief Executive of this Concern.” Caleb’s lips did not open, but his mind echoed the words. The King in Red spoke for him, for all of them. “I accept the terms of our contract and the privileges and responsibilities stipulated there.”

Mal, or rather Heartstone Holdings overshadowing her, stared into Kopil’s burning eyes and said through dagger teeth: “I stand embodied in this my servant; as Heartstone, I accept the terms and conditions of our pact, and the responsibilities and privileges therein. What we forge today never will be sundered.”

“What we forge today never will be sundered,” Kopil repeated and the audience with him.

Mal drew close, walking six inches above the stage as if the air was solid ground. The King in Red embraced her, and she returned his embrace with arms of fire; their worlds tilted toward each other, and they kissed.

It was not the kiss Caleb remembered from the night of the blackout. That had been soft and harsh and strong, but a human softness, a human harshness and a human strength. This was a god-kiss, skeletal teeth touching lips cool and strong as marble, two colossal powers driven by a need that was not desire, an eagerness that was not passion. One was the shadow cast by the other, but which was which?

Or was each the shadow cast, and neither one the caster?

Thorns pierced the King in Red and Heartstone-in-Mal, and spread, weaving through Kopil’s bones and coursing in Mal’s blood. Barbs curled out of Kopil’s eye sockets and burst Mal’s eyes from the inside, flowered between his teeth and ripped her throat and tongue as they tied, and tangled, and became one.

Seventy-thousand-page contracts sitting in the RKC archives erupted with unearthly light. Blood signatures burned into reality; silver glyphs appeared on stone circles and obelisks throughout Dresediel Lex and in cities around the world, as if etched in an instant by giants with diamond chisels. The pacts built by hundreds of Craftsmen over thousands of billable hours were loose strands of rope, and the kiss one pull tightening them to a knot.

Seconds passed, grains of sand falling down a well deep as forever. Through ticks of agony Caleb wondered how Mal could bear the pain.

The deed was done. The thorns joined. Heartstone Holdings was itself no longer, subsumed into RKC; Red King Consolidated was itself no longer, transformed by consuming Heartstone.

Mal’s lips clung briefly to Kopil’s teeth, so gently did he pull away. Before she fell, she clutched him tight, leaned in until her cheek brushed the side of his skull, and whispered into his earwell: “Still interested?”

She sank to the stage. The lightning frame of Heartstone left her and wound about the King in Red, a separate form at first, then a swelling within the firestorm of his being, then merged entirely and gone.

Caleb collapsed into his own skin. Others glanced about in confusion, wondering at the significance of Mal’s last words. Some code between her and the King in Red, a joke or dare: speculation whispered through the awed hush.

Caleb did not wonder. He turned to Teo.

“I have to go,” he said, and fought toward the door.

18

Caleb sprinted through twisting halls and passages, all alike. By intuition and dumb luck he soon found an iron door fitted with latches resembling eagle’s claws—a former fasting chamber that served visiting speakers as a green room. Mal would be there now, resting. Caleb touched the door, the latches gave, and he tumbled into a small room hung with yellow-and-black tapestries. Ghostlight danced in iron braziers on the walls.

Mal, Alaxic, and the King in Red sipped sparkling wine around a stone basin in the room’s center.

She would be resting, yes. Or else celebrating the deal with two of the city’s most powerful Craftsmen.

“Mister Altemoc?” The King in Red sounded shocked, even amused. Caleb backed toward the door.

“Hi,” he said. “Sir,” and “Sir,” again to shrunken Alaxic, who regarded him with narrowed eyes and a thin, warped smile. “Excuse me. I should, um. Go.”

Don’t say anything, he begged Mal with his eyes.

“Caleb! What a surprise!”

“Ms. Kekapania.” Kopil’s skull revolved from Caleb to the woman beside him. “Are you and Mr. Altemoc acquainted?”

She raised her glass to Caleb first, then to the Deathless King and Alaxic. She drank. “We’re dating, actually.”

“Dating?”

Caleb and his boss spoke at the same time. They looked at each other, then back at Mal. She shrugged. “I wasn’t convinced at first, either, but he’s persistent.”

The blood red sparks of Kopil’s eyes winked out, and returned. Caleb had never seen the King in Red blink before.

“I didn’t know she worked for Heartstone when I met her,” he said.

Mal raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t have come after me if you knew who I was?”

“It would have changed the way I approached you. Yes.”

She raised her glass in a salute and downed its contents.

Kopil’s shoulders shook. A noise like grinding gravel issued from somewhere below the hinge of his jaw.

The King in Red was laughing.

“I’ll leave,” Caleb said, and reached behind him to open the door. He did not want to take his eyes off the three Craftsmen. “I’m so sorry I burst in. I didn’t expect anyone would be here.”

“Sure, sure, sure.” Kopil nodded three times. “Take the day off.” He spun his finger bones in a circle above the basin. Water droplets took the shape of miniature nymphs, who skidded over the surface like skaters over ice. “Let us all celebrate Alaxic’s retirement.”

“The pleasure is mine. I leave you to inherit the rising salaries and health-care costs of my employees, my tempestuous engineering department, and my other bureaucratic diseases. I, meanwhile, will retire and find a hobby. Gardening, perhaps.”

“Lord Kopil,” Mal said, “may I escort Caleb out?”

“Of course. Go. Get out of our hair. Metaphorical hair, in my case. Try not to kill him. Hard to replace good people these days.”

“Lord Kopil, Lord Alaxic.” Mal said as she bowed to each. “It’s been a pleasure. Let’s do this again soon.” She grabbed the sleeve of Caleb’s jacket, and pulled him into the hall after her. Behind them, the water nymphs began to scream. Their high-pitched cries pursued Caleb and Mal through the maze of passages.

“What is going on here,” Caleb said when he thought they were safely out of earshot. She turned on him with a finger to her lips, and said nothing more until they reached the front door of the pyramid and stepped out into sunshine.

“How’s this?”

“Not far enough. Why don’t you buy me a drink?”

Mal raised her hand. A four-foot-long dragonfly fell from the sky with a whir like a thick book’s pages being fanned, and landed on Mal’s outstretched arm. Translucent wings split sunlight into a rainbow haze. Another dragonfly landed on Caleb’s shoulder, bowl-sized eye inches from his face. He flinched, and resisted the urge to brush the insect away.

Mal laughed at his shock, and stroked her opteran’s thorax. Broad wings twitched in anticipation. “You don’t take fliers often?”

“Isn’t the airbus good enough for you? These things,” he said with a flick at his opteran’s exoskeleton, “are expensive.”

“They are expensive,” she allowed. “And your Concern just closed the largest deal in its history. Celebrate.”

Her teeth gleamed in the sunlight. The creature perched on her forearm regarded him with many-faceted eyes, each facet quizzical.

Optera were descended from smaller bugs the gods and priests had used to ferry packages across the city. After Liberation, Craftsmen swelled the creatures’ size, gave them unnatural strength, and changed their diet. Instead of other bugs, fliers fed on the souls of those they bore aloft. “There are stories,” he said, contemplating its feathery proboscis, “of young Craftswomen riding these things drunk.”

“I’ve heard them.”

“They get so caught up in the flight that they forget to land. The opteran brings a husk back, or nothing at all.”

“Some girls don’t know when to quit,” Mal said. “Same for boys.”

“Where to?”

“You choose. Last time I made you follow me. I don’t want to seem unfair.”

“Emphasis on the ‘seem.’ You’re happy being unfair.”

She lifted the opteran to her shoulder. Joints clicked as it crawled over her. Two long limbs latched under her arms. Two circled her waist, and two her thighs. Translucent wings spread from her back. She wore the creature as a mantle, its monstrous head rising above her own.

“See if you can catch me,” he said, moved the opteran to his own back, and flew.

19

They landed on one of the balconies that bloomed like flower petals from Andrej’s penthouse bar. The optera buzzed off, leaving Caleb and Mal alone with sky and city and declining sun. An airbus drifted past between them and the light.

“What do you think?” With one sweep of his arm Caleb took in the view.

“It is wonderful,” she said. “You could watch the world end from here and be happy for it.”

“I don’t often come to Andrej’s when the sun’s up. The games start late.”

“You gamble,” she said.

“I play cards. Poker, mostly.”

“What else?”

“Bridge, when I was a kid. Not so often these days.”

“Why’d you stop?”

“I lost my partner.”

Wind and surf filled the silence between them. She turned from the city and leaned against the railing, arms crossed, head lowered, waiting for the question Caleb did not know how to ask.

“Who are you?” was the best he could manage.

“What do you mean?”

“When I met you, you said you were a cliff runner. You said you broke into Bright Mirror Reservoir because it was good exercise.”

“It was good exercise.”

“And your being a senior Heartstone executive had nothing to do with it.”

“I’m hardly senior,” she said.

“I put myself at risk for you, and I don’t mean just chasing you over rooftops. I didn’t tell the King in Red about you, or the Wardens. I could be fired for that—hells, I could be tried and convicted. I trusted you.”

“Not smart, trusting someone you’ve only met once.”

“I never claimed I was smart. I don’t know if you owe me an explanation, but I want one. And I think you’ll give it to me.”

She walked from the railing to the balcony door. It was locked.

“They don’t open for another twenty minutes.”

“You planned this, I see.”

“Didn’t you?”

She frowned, turned from him, and paced the balcony, weaving between tables and chairs. He did not move, but followed her with his eyes.

At last, she wheeled on him, feet wide-planted, hands on her hips. “Alaxic told me he didn’t trust your security. Not with the Serpents at stake. He knew I ran, and he asked me to run a penetration test. Not to break anything, just get in if I could, and out again.”

“He wanted leverage against the King in Red.”

“Of course. He had to send someone he could trust. But he couldn’t give me anything to help, in case I was caught. So I found a Quechal glyph-artist in the Skittersill who made that pendant. Claimed it would hide me from anything.”

“It did more than hide you.”

She crossed her arms and turned away. Caleb waited.

“I know,” she said at last. “I didn’t realize until after you took it from me. I’ve never dealt with Quechal glyphwork. If the tooth was made with modern Craft, I would have seen right away. I was blind, and I guess I deserve to suffer for it. The blackout, the Tzimet, your dead guard, my dead friends—the cliff runners who died at North Station—those are my fault. So you’re safe. I can’t turn you in, because you’d do the same to me. For all I know, you’ll do that anyway.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

He sought the dry blue sky for an answer, finding none. “I need a drink,” he said at last.

“I’ll buy.”

He walked to the balcony door and rapped his knuckle against the glass until the bartender heard, and opened the door to ask their business. “Drinking,” Caleb said, and Mal added, “Dancing.” The bartender regarded them both skeptically, but she recognized Caleb and, after a few thaums changed hands, she let them inside.

Chairs stood on tables. The marble tiles were clean-swept. A quartet tuned on the stage by the dance floor—drums, bass, piano, and trombone, dinner jackets immaculate white. Caleb ordered a gin and tonic, Mal single malt on the rocks; the bartender set the glasses in front of them and busied herself stocking the icebox for the evening.

“To you,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

“That’s hardly a fair toast.” She pulled her glass away from his.

“You know me—my job, my family, or at least my father. I only learned your full name today.”

“Well.” Her whiskey cast golden light on the bar. “My name doesn’t get you much. My parents died when I was a kid. My aunt and uncle couldn’t support me, but a scholarship sent me to a good school, and after that to the Floating Collegium.” Caleb recognized the name: an academy of Craft a hundred miles farther up the coast and inland. Classy place, good sports teams. “Once I graduated, I drifted back to the city. Heartstone was new then, and growing. Alaxic was one of the sponsors of my scholarship, and he offered me a position. How’s that?”

“It’s a start.”

“A start, he says. It’s not as though I know much more about you.”

“You know more than most of the people who work with me.”

“You mean, they don’t know who your father is.”

“I don’t exactly spread it around. Like you say—Temoc’s a pretty common name.”

“I don’t care about your father,” she said with another sip of whiskey. “He’s no mystery. Unlike you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Mal left her drink at the bar, and walked to the band’s dais. She spoke briefly to their leader, passed him a sliver of silver. Half-formed melodies and scales cohered: the bass the spine, the drums ribs, the piano and horn meat and sinews of music.

Her hips rolled to the beat as she returned. She held out a hand, and said, “Let’s dance.”

He let her lead him onto the floor.

Caleb was not a good dancer, but Mal was. She matched his steps, and by her body’s alchemy transformed his unfinished movements into gold. His hand fit below her shoulder blades as if sculpted for that purpose, and her fingers rested warm against his palm.

The walking bass line quickened, and with it Caleb’s steps and Mal’s. Caleb could not tell who led whom. He lifted his arm, perhaps in answer to a suggestion from her wrist, and she spun, white skirt flaring with the force of her revolution. Stepping through, he turned, too, her arm falling to his waist and his to hers.

Drums beat in syncopation with Caleb’s heart, one two quick-step. Their turns swelled and sharpened as cymbals clashed and the drums took their solo.

Mal’s fingers slipped from Caleb’s hand. He lurched, too slow, to catch her, but as she started to fall, invisible cords caught his arm. Her Craft lines snapped taut and Mal stopped in midair, rigid as a plank, her left arm extended toward Caleb. Beneath the skin of her arms and fingers, glyphs glowed silver. With a snap of arm and shoulder, she pulled herself back up, and spun toward him once more.

He let momentum carry her past him. His hand moved in a swift half circle, and he grabbed at empty air. He caught her Craft line, solid, invisible, and cold, and Mal stopped.

Pale light streamed from the scars on Caleb’s arms. He pulled her back to him.

Sweat beaded on her forehead and her lip. “I didn’t know you had glyphwork.”

“I don’t.”

She didn’t ask him to explain. They danced, touching and not touching, bound by invisible cord, each in accelerating orbit of the other. Her glyphs left tracks of shadow in the air, and his scars trailed light.

The band played three songs, a small set, before breaking to prepare in earnest for the evening. Neither Caleb nor Mal objected. Leaning against each other, they staggered to the nearest table and called for the bartender. Waiting, Caleb watched Mal. She hugged her shoulders and shivered. The Craft devoured heat, life force, soulstuff. Combining Craftwork and physical exertion—no wonder she was cold.

“You’re a great dancer,” he said.

“You’re not bad yourself.” Her hands traced a cat’s cradle in the air before her. “What are those scars?”

He turned away from her, to the empty dance floor.

“Tell me.”

“It’s personal.”

“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”

Caleb ordered soda water and Mal a mug of hot tea when the waiter drifted past. After she left, Mal said: “It was an excellent dance. I’m sorry if I was too curious. All the Lords and Ladies know there are parts of my life I don’t like to talk about.”

“Okay.” Caleb rolled down his shirt cuffs, and buttoned them. “It’s a sensitive subject. I’m sorry.”

“I can live with that.” Their drinks arrived. Greedily, Mal drank her tea, both the liquid and the heat inside it: she touched the mug, the glyphs on her hands sparked, and frost spread from her touch. By the time the mug reached her lips, dew clung to its sides. Color returned to her cheeks.

She set her empty mug down. Ice crystals encased the tea leaves within. Strange future, for someone. “Where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I told your boss we were dating, to keep you from saying something stupid and ruining our careers. I don’t find the idea of dating you repellant, of course.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“My point is, we have a choice. We don’t need to keep up the illusion. I can walk out of here now, never look back. Our paths probably won’t cross again. Your boss never needs to know I spied on him, or that you hid information. Either that, or we could try to make this work.”

“What do you mean?”

She leaned across the table toward him. “Are you … interested in me?”

He remembered her eyes, black and endless, in his living room, in the dark, after the explosion.

He tried to speak, but could not. Across the room, the bass played a slow, deep scale. “Yes,” he said, at last.

“Good. Me too.” She stood and placed a silver coin on the table to cover her drinks.

“You’re leaving?”

She smiled with one side of her mouth, like a crack in a stained-glass window. “Last time we were together, I gave you an invitation, and you declined. I can’t just come to you because you want me now.”

“I’m serious.” He stood, so she could not look down on him.

“So am I. But I don’t want to rush this.” She revolved around the table to him, eclipsing the world as she approached. “Do you trust me?”

“You saved my life.”

“Say it.”

“I trust you.”

“I’ll come for you in my own time. Find someone else, if you’re not comfortable waiting; plenty of girls out there wouldn’t mind you. If you’d rather have someone who wants you, someone you want in turn, then wait, and let me claim you when I claim you.”

“You enjoy this.”

“Making you suffer? Maybe a little.” She held her hand up next to her eye, thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “You can handle it. You’re a strong young man. Loyal. Brave.” She slapped him on the shoulder, hard. “And a good dancer.”

“I’ll wait. Not forever, but I’ll wait.”

“I know.”

She turned from him and left. Doors opened without her touching them, and drifted closed behind. Her afterimage burned in the dark behind his eyes, dimming from gold to red to purple to colors deeper than black, an invisible brand on his brain.

He lifted her coin from the table, felt the piece of her soul worked into it, and walked her down his knuckles and up again.

If he could have seen through the bartender’s eyes when she came to refill his drink, he would have recognized his grin—though he had only seen it on Mal’s face before.

He ordered his dinner and sat alone while lovers, dancers, and gamesmen drifted in to Andrej’s bar. Deep in thought. Laying plans.

20

Two weeks later, the water ran black.

Caleb and Teo were sharing dinner in her apartment over a game of chess. Sam lay supine on the couch. A glass of cold white wine dangled from her fingers.

Every year, when spring evaporated into the punishing heat of desert summer, Teo stole a few bottles of old wine from her family’s cellar and held a private bacchanal. Caleb was a usual guest on these occasions, but this year he had not expected to attend—Sam harbored sharp, serrated feelings toward him after his interruption the night of the Bright Mirror disaster. She caved to Teo’s pressure at the last moment, though, and Caleb received an invitation the day before the event. Sam was friendlier in person than Caleb expected—which was to say, cold and gratingly radical, but she had not yet opened outright hostilities.

Their games proceeded in triangular fashion—Caleb lost to Teo, who loved chess though she did not study it, and Teo lost to Sam, who was too busy railing against the hierarchical relationships encoded in the rules to notice how blatantly Teo let her win. Sam lost to Caleb, and the cycle repeated.

Teo’s bishop scythed across the board to complete Caleb’s most recent humiliation. He stood, swayed, and surrendered his seat to Sam, then excused himself to the kitchen.

High and far back in Teo’s cabinet he found a clean mug, placed it in the sink, and touched a glyph on the dragon-headed faucet. The glyph glowed, ripping away a fragment of soul so small Caleb barely felt it, and the faucet vomited black water over his hand into the mug.

He cursed, dropped the mug, and reached for a towel. The black sludge kept flowing, and a rancid, rotting odor filled the kitchen. When he slapped the faucet glyph, the flow stopped. He touched it again, testing. The dragon disgorged three more drops into Teo’s sink, retched, and died.

“Teo?”

“Did you break something?” Sam called back.

“Teo, does your building have any trouble with RKC? Anything wrong with the water?”

“No. Hells, if there was trouble I’d be the first one with a torch and pitchfork.” Noise from the living room: Teo pushing her chair back from the table. “What’s wrong?”

“The water’s black.”

“What do you mean?” Before he could answer, she reached the kitchen door and saw, smelled, for herself. She blanched. “Gods. What is that?”

She sounded more shocked than a broken sink would warrant. Caleb began to turn, to see if he’d missed something.

Several small, sharp knives struck him in the back at high speed. He fell, cursing. Hooked claws tore at his skin. Groping over his shoulder, he felt a shell of slick, curved chitin, cold as ice. Small legs scraped his hand. He ripped the creature from his back and threw it across the room. A black, sharp blur, it struck the wall and splashed into a hundred fat droplets. Caleb bent forward, and panted. He heard Teo swear, and looked up.

The droplets had grown legs, pincers, snapping mandibles, multifaceted eyes. Sprouting from the wall, they skittered across the floor toward him.

Tzimet.

In the water.

“Shit!” He staggered back, flailing for a weapon. From the sink he heard a clatter of claws and teeth. His clutching fingers found Teo’s knife block. He drew a cleaver and whirled to face the sink, from which reared an insect the size of a small dog, mandibles gnashing.

The cleaver passed through the creature’s head, struck the sink, skidded and sparked. Caleb slipped and fell, still holding the knife. The creature hissed, and the droplet-bugs advanced. Teo grabbed a broom and struck the little bugs with its bristles. The sink-thing flopped onto the counter, and thudded to the floor a few inches from Caleb’s leg.

“What’s going on in there?” Sam, approaching from the living room. “You two better—” She cut off, and drew a heavy breath.

Caleb raised the knife as the sink-creature scuttled toward him, recovered from its fall. Not that the knife would do much good. He needed a broom of his own, or a stick, or—

A frying pan slammed down onto the Tzimet, pulping shell, claw, leg, and staring eye, and shattering ceramic floor tiles. Sam raised the pan and brought it down again. The wet black smear stopped moving.

Sam extended her hand to him. Blond hair frizzed into a halo about her head.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice heavy with shock.

“No problem,” she replied. “I can’t believe that worked.”

Teo had given up sweeping the bugs away in favor of spearing them with her broom’s bristles. She struck, and the creatures popped into tiny, inert puddles. “What are these things?”

“Tzimet,” Caleb said as Sam pulled him to his feet.

“Like at Bright Mirror.”

“But smaller.”

Caleb heard a scream from the apartment next door.

“What in all hells is going on?” Teo asked, but Caleb was no longer in the kitchen to answer her.

He ran out of Teo’s apartment toward the neighboring flat. The door was closed; he knocked, and wished he were sober. The woman inside cried out again, and he struck the door with his shoulder and all the strength his scars could give him. The door burst off its hinges, and he stumbled into a grim gray living room heavy with the stench of sulfur and burnt metal and old blood. A gray-haired woman in a bathrobe swung a thick pillow against a horde of animated shower-droplets, spiders carved from black ice. Caleb grabbed towels from the bathroom, and tossed them to Sam and Teo as they ran in through the front door after him. Together, they smothered the little evil things with the towels. The towels, at least, did not rise up against them.

The neighbor stared dumbfounded at her stained rug and linens, at her traitor bathroom, at Caleb.

“Water inspectors, Ma’am,” Caleb lied, and flashed his RKC identification. “Reports of hard water in this area. I have to take a sample; do you have a small bottle I could borrow?”

The neighbor was an amateur chemist, and from her back room workbench (alchemical sigils shed dim light on glass retorts, phials of quicksilver and phosphorescent dye; a dead mouse, arms and legs pinned to the points of a triangle), she produced a small test tube with a rubber stopper, which he filled with water wrung from the towels.

Placing the tube in a pocket of his blazer, he made a quick excuse—“more apartments to see, sorry for the inconvenience, please direct any questions or concerns to customer service”—and backed hastily through the front door, urging her not to open her taps until further notice.

In the hall, he exchanged harried looks with Sam and Teo. Sam’s skin flushed red with action and anger; Teo tried three times to speak and at last stammered: “What the hell, Caleb?”

“I don’t know. We locked the Tzimet in Bright Mirror. They couldn’t get out.” But his mind betrayed him with images of Mal’s necklace, of the white-winged woman burning in the sky over North Station, of his father. The Tzimet could not escape unaided, but there were forces more pernicious and persistent than demons working against the city. “We need to get to the office.”

From down the hall came another cry, deeper, a man’s. Teo glanced from him, to Sam, then back in the direction of the scream.

Before she could say anything, Sam interrupted. “I’ll take care of it. You two get to work. Fix this.” Before either of them could object, she sprinted down the hall, a towel clutched in each hand.

“She’s a keeper,” Caleb said when Sam was out of earshot.

“I’ll get my coat,” Teo replied.

Pedestrians shuddered on the sidewalk, wearing housecoats and trousers, crying or shouting, clutching cuts through clothes and skin. Wardens clogged the sky. One broke a high window in the Seven Stars, and jumped inside. Glass shards rained down, and Caleb took cover under his jacket.

Caleb and Teo caught a driverless carriage across town. Skyspires drifted in the evening clouds. Crisscross ribbons of traffic coursed through the heavens along lanes marked by hovering lanterns: west to the suburbs, east or south toward the nighttime carnivals of Monicola Pier and the Skittersill. Buses of day laborers floated back to their tired camps in Stonewood amid the skeletons of trees. The sky was mostly empty of Wardens.

“Looks like the Tzimet haven’t spread far,” Teo said.

“Not yet.”

The carriage turned onto an elevated road, and streets sank out of view as the horse surged to full gallop. They had the road to themselves. Few carts or wagons crossed the city’s center so late; the densest traffic was farther south, near the port, where trucks pulled by oxen and giant lizards bore freight from the oceangoing ships docked at Longsands to warehouses in Skittersill and Fisherman’s Vale.

They descended from the elevated road to surface streets. A fight boiled outside a busy nightclub: girls in short spangled dresses and young men in wide-brimmed hats flailed at one another. Water sellers hawked refreshment to the drunk and disorderly. Those carts would have long lines in front of them soon. For sixty years, the city’s need for water had been satisfied without fail by the taps, pipes, wells, and dams of Red King Consolidated. That chain was broken.

At last the darkness of the 700 block closed around them. No streetlamps here, where they would wash out the starlight great Concerns needed for their Craft. The pregnant moon shone overhead. Pinprick stars winked in distant mockery.

Caleb shivered. In Camlaan and Iskar and Alt Coulumb—across most of Kath, for that matter—poets wrote odes to the beauty of the stars. The Quechal knew better. Great demons lived between the stars, and in them, beings immense in power and size, who sucked the marrow from suns and sang songs that drove galaxies mad.

There were demons on earth, now, too.

He watched the skies, and thought about death, riots, and Tzimet. To full-grown, healthy men and women, creatures like the ones he and Sam had fought presented little danger, but not everyone was full-grown and healthy. Many would fall, and die, tonight. The stars would watch, and hunger.

The usual protesters chanted outside 667 Sansilva. Teo and Caleb left the cab and shouldered past the crowd toward the pyramid. A squad of RKC employees had erected complaint booths in the parking lot, in front of trucks stacked high with pipes and wire. Good. They already knew. Some emergency policy, gathering dust in the archives beside deals with dead gods and distant autarchs, must have been wiped clean and consulted. He hoped the customer service scripts were not decades out of date.

The lobby stank of cigarettes, despite the no-smoking signs. Stress drove men and women to long-unopened packs stored in the backs of drawers or at the desks of trusted friends. They congregated beneath bas-reliefs of the Red King’s triumph, and smoked and whispered in tight clutches. Caleb and Teo crossed the lobby and listened, taut as antennas. They did not speak until they reached a blissfully empty lift.

“Sounds like the attack is limited to downtown,” Caleb said when the doors rolled shut. “And pieces of Sansilva.”

“No gods anymore,” Teo commented as the lift began to rise.

“No.”

“Then who do we thank for small favors?”

He closed his eyes and melted into the lift wall. “Shit. This is all my fault somehow.”

“We don’t know if it’s anybody’s fault, yet.”

“Can’t be an accident. Tzimet before, Tzimet now. We have an enemy.”

“If so,” Teo said, “we’ll find them.”

The elevator rose through their silence.

“You’ll be up all night,” she said.

“You, too. Your office will be flooded with messenger rats.”

“Don’t remind me. Thousands of notes of desperation, and nothing I can do but pass them along to the service department, who will be even worse off than either of us. Do you think people are okay, out there?”

“I hope so.” A bell chimed, doors rolled back, and Caleb stepped out. “Good luck with the rats,” he called to Teo as the elevator resumed its ascent behind him.

Most of the offices and cubicles in risk management were dark. Even workaholic Tollan was gone: visiting her mother in the farthest recesses of Fisherman’s Vale, where bungalows bordered on orange groves.

She would be back, as would the others, but in the meantime that left Caleb in charge. And the King in Red would want answers, soon.

Light streamed under the door of a conference room down the hall, the department’s only sign of life.

He thrust the door open, and it struck the wall with a mighty noise. Mick and the few other actuaries that constituted his army looked up from the documents sprawled on the conference table. Paper fluttered in the draft; ghostlight shone from Craft circles scrawled onto slate walls. A young woman hunched over a gutted chicken on a silver tray. The room stank of fear and auspices.

He saw himself through their eyes: hair wild, eyes wide, clothes shredded. Blood seeped from the wound in his shoulder.

“Ladies,” he said. “Gentlemen. Tell me what you know. And someone, please find me a bandage.”

21

Forty-five minutes later, Caleb stood in a dark and spacious room, addressing figures wrapped in shadow. “The black sludge is basically water.” He removed the test tube from his pocket and placed it on the long mahogany table. “Laden with muck, heavy metals, and particulate refuse, obviously unsafe to drink, but water nonetheless. Water, infested with Tzimet.”

“We are fortunate it appeared so unappetizing,” said Ostrakov, the Chief of Operations, from a seat to Caleb’s left. “Imagine if someone drank Tzimet water. We are doubly fortunate that only the wealthiest districts were affected. The Skittersill would have rioted by now.”

“Do not underestimate the number of disturbances we have put down tonight,” said gray-faced Chihuac of the Security Bureau. She wore a Warden’s badge and number, but no mask: the public, human face of Dresediel Lex’s police. “Seventy-three arrests in the last two hours, for public brawling, disturbing the peace, arson, assault, and second-degree sedition. That’s aside from the injuries caused directly by Tzimet.”

“And why is our water no longer safe to drink?” Lord Kopil leaned forward from his throne at the far end of the table. Darkness rippled around him like a cloak, and the fires of his eyes flared.

Caleb’s throat was too dry for him to swallow. Tollan sat at the table beside Chihuac, but there had been no time to bring her up to speed before the meeting. This was his play.

He tapped a Craft circle on the table. On the wall behind him, a wriggling colony of glowworms flared to display a map of the west coast of Northern Kath. Dresediel Lex strangled a giant bay in the continent’s southwest corner. Blue lines wound from the city across the blasted desert, north and east into mountain ranges and south into the jungles of the Fangs. “Most of our water comes from Bay Station.” He gestured to a glowing dot at the harbor’s mouth. “But we haven’t been able to expand its production since the mid-eighties, while the population of Dresediel Lex has grown three percent a year. More people means we need more water—for manufacture and agriculture as well as drinking and bathing. The native water table is already too depleted to support the city. We’ve contracted with other Concerns to pump water from springs, lakes, and rivers in the wilderness. Heartstone was one of the most productive of these contracts; that’s why we subsumed them.” It was not precise to say devour, though that was the word Caleb used in private to describe the process: Heartstone lived on within the hideous, many-limbed organism of RKC.

“One of their main projects was Seven Leaf Lake, a natural reservoir in the northern Drakspine. Eighty square miles of surface area, and deep—a hundred twenty eight million acre-feet, fed by snowmelt and mountain springs, with a refresh time of about two hundred years. Seven Leaf has enough water to sustain our growth for another decade at least. Over the last two years, Heartstone has bound the local spirits and opened an aqueduct between Dresediel Lex and Seven Leaf. Three days ago we began mixing Seven Leaf water with the DL system, specifically in Sansilva and downtown. We chose those districts to limit unrest in the event of any, ah, problems.”

When he said “we,” he spoke figuratively. No one had asked his advice about these decisions. But he was a part of something larger than himself—one limb of a reeling beast.

“The Seven Leaf water is tainted.” Caleb removed a second phial of black water from his pocket. “Maintenance tapped this direct from the Seven Leaf aqueduct half an hour ago.” He removed the phial’s cap and poured foul black liquid onto the table.

It landed on the lacquered wood with eight legs sharp as scythes, an exoskeleton lacking guts or soft tissue. Mandibles clashed in the air. The tiny Tzimet screeched with organs that were not quite vocal chords, and pounced at Ostrakov, who vaporized it with a backhand wave.

Kopil’s red gaze turned to Alana Mazetchul, head of the Pipeline group—draped in robes, her face fallow and lined as if she had not slept in months. “Were there any signs of contamination in Seven Leaf Lake before tonight?”

“No,” Mazetchul replied. “None of Heartstone’s water came to us tainted, nor do their projects have a history of Craft trouble. We performed extensive tests on Seven Leaf Station before Heartstone was subsumed.”

She left that sentence hanging, and Caleb recognized his cue. “The corruption could have two sources: either the aqueducts and pipes are faulty—unlikely considering the number of wards that would have to malfunction—or the problem lies at the source, with Seven Leaf Station or the lake itself. Seven Leaf Lake contains about a hundred and a quarter million acre-feet of water. It could not have become this corrupted in a few weeks. Trouble at the station is the likely cause: accident, assault, act of gods. We can’t raise the station by nightmare telegraph, which supports this theory.”

“An attack using Tzimet,” Tollan added, “would fit the pattern established by Bright Mirror Reservoir.”

Caleb waited for someone else to speak. When no questions or objections rose, he continued.

“Until we fix the problem at Seven Leaf, we’ll have to meet the city’s water needs somehow. Conjuring water out of thin air, or purifying the ocean with evaporation, is expensive. To subsume Heartstone, we issued private bonds, and borrowed funds from other Concerns including First Soul of Alt Coulumb, the Collective of Iskari Faith, and Kyrie Thaumaturgics. If we borrow more, other Deathless Kings will doubt our creditworthiness, which leaves us open to attack. Unless we find a major source of soulstuff, our only other option will be to adopt rolling droughts within the city.”

Kopil shifted in his chair. Hidden snakes rubbed scales against scales in the darkness around the table. “There will be riots, if we institute a drought.”

“There will be riots anyway.” That was Chihuac. “Sansilva and downtown may be more easily cowed than the Skittersill, but the limits of the people’s patience have been tested. Rolling droughts will manage social unrest.”

“Exactly,” Caleb said. “We can’t afford to appear weak, especially if we are: a lack of confidence will make it even harder to borrow the soulstuff we need to survive this.”

“Why not use the Serpents?”

An opening door shed light into the dark conference room, and Mal stood on its threshold. Caleb’s first impulse was to run toward her, but he suppressed the urge, and watched.

Mal’s words rippled through the room. Ostrakov swore in a language Caleb did not recognize. Chihuac and Mazetchul turned to the King in Red, either for reassurance or to watch his reaction. Tollan grimaced.

Kopil spoke, his voice heavy with death and time. “I summoned Ms. Kekapania to this meeting. I am glad she has chosen to attend. If Heartstone has exposed us, Heartstone should stand to account.”

The door closed behind Mal. “Sorry I’m late. The crowd’s grown outside.” Her footsteps approached through the dark. Stripes of lamplight revealed and concealed her by turns as she circled the table. “I’ll do better than stand to account. I can fix this.”

“Explain.”

“The Serpents have all the power we need. You’ve wanted an excuse to draw on them for months.”

Caleb glanced down at his notes, turned a few pages, and found the figure he sought. “We’d have to spend more power keeping them asleep than we can draw from them.”

“Much more,” Mal said. “But over a longer time. The Serpents grant you a reprieve. Think of it as a loan to yourself, with interest.”

“That doesn’t make sense. We can’t loan soulstuff to ourselves.” He expected others to join in, but no one spoke. All eyes had turned to Kopil.

The King in Red‘s eyes burned in shadow. “Your people have caused this chaos. Why should we trust you to fix it?”

Before the dread lord of RKC, Mal looked smaller than he remembered.

“Because I can imagine what you’ll do to us if we fail,” she said.

“Can you.”

“I have a powerful imagination.”

“It will be worse than you imagine. For you not least of all.”

“Give me a chance. Use the Serpents to preserve the illusion of your strength. In three days, I can fix Seven Leaf Lake.” She held so still the world seemed to spin around her. “If all the demons from all the hells stand in my way, I will break them.”

In the ensuing silence Caleb heard the breaths of the four people in the room who still breathed: Tollan, Chihuac, Mal, and himself. Most of RKC’s executive board had discarded lungs and blood on the thorn-paved path to their current positions.

“So let it be,” Kopil said. “We will send Caleb with you.”

The number of breaths reduced by one. Stunned to strangulation, Caleb looked up at his boss. Bony hands rested on the table beside Kopil’s mug of cold coffee.

Mal bore the King in Red’s gaze, and Caleb’s, and the board’s, as if they were the stares of frightened rabbits.

“Alone?” Caleb asked.

“Of course not.” The King in Red struck his teeth together, and Caleb heard laughter echo up from a deep well. “You’ll travel with an escort of Wardens, on our fastest Couatl. Leaving tomorrow morning, you should reach Seven Leaf early the following day. Assess the situation and determine what aid you require. Fix the problem within three days; if you cannot do so, whisper my name thrice before a mirror in darkness, and I will send aid.”

“I understand,” Mal said.

The conference room stretched cavernous about them. Mal turned from Kopil to Caleb, and smiled a cliff runner’s smile.

“This should be fun.”

22

Mal excused herself to prepare. Caleb wanted to follow her, but he could not snub the Directors in their power. They wrung information from him: captives in a hot, dry cell, fighting for a drink from the same mangled sponge.

“How much water can we cut back from manufacturing and agriculture in the next week without damaging crops?” asked Alana Mazetchul, who had little love for RKC’s industrial business. Ostrakov, whose department served farmers, makers, and builders of things, cut in before Caleb could answer Mazetchul: “How many souls are lost every minute our manufacturing plants stand dead?” More questions followed that, each one pointed, though Caleb could not see the purpose of every barb. He answered in raw figures with no commentary. He could not allow himself to be torn between these fanged eminences. He had problems enough already.

For thirty minutes they grilled him, and as each minute passed he felt Mal retreat further into the night.

The King in Red listened, and made occasional notes on his yellow notepad with a quill pen. He did not speak.

At last, Caleb exhausted the pool of questions. The meeting adjourned with a solemn incantation: “We wait, and we rise; we move, and the earth trembles.” They stood as one and left the room severally—somber, disturbed, and determined not to betray their exhaustion as they retreated into shadows. Sixty years ago, these men and women broke the heavens, and made the gods weep. They had spent the time since learning how hard it was to run a world.

Tollan joined Caleb at the front of the room. “Well done,” she said, with a ghost of a smile. “Don’t die up there.”

“I’ll try not to.”

She left.

Two others remained in the conference room. Chihuac waited by Kopil’s throne; in the crook of one arm she carried a scroll as long as a sword. The King in Red leaned on the table and levered himself to his feet. The sparks of his eyes dimmed, and Caleb heard something like a cough rattle where his esophagus once had been.

“Sir?” Forgetting his notes, he moved to the King in Red. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” the skeleton said. “Thousands cry out to me that they thirst, that they are wounded; thousands more will join them soon. Their need tears at my soul. I could die, satisfying them, and if I die, so will they. Yet if I do not satisfy them, they will also die, and the city will die, and I will die at last. I am, in short, a perfect image of health. Someone will carve me on a monument.”

“I’ve drawn up figures,” said Chihuac, “for increased Warden deployment over the next week.”

“We will discuss them in my office in ten minutes. I must speak with Caleb. Alone.”

She withdrew. Her shoes were soft-soled, her step light. She walked into shadow and disappeared. He heard no door open or close in her wake.

“What’s your plan?” Caleb said when they were alone.

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you sending me north? I won’t be able to help.”

“Your mere presence will suffice.” Kopil lifted his coffee and his notepad and walked into the unbroken black. Caleb followed.

The last trace of light failed. Cloak and King were different textures of darkness. Caleb blinked, and with eyes closed he saw a hallway outlined about them in silver-blue fire, and the King in Red a lightning mosaic, a many-limbed spider with a thousand slavering mouths.

He opened his eyes, and saw nothing.

Liquid shadow welled about his legs. Viscous, palpable, it rose from his ankles, to his knees, to his waist. The tips of his fingers trailed over the surface of the shade. Shadows covered his chest, his neck. When they reached his mouth he expected to choke, yet when he inhaled they sat sweetly in his lungs. The dark enclosed him. He could not see the red of Kopil’s cloak. His body was ice. He closed his eyes.

His next step pressed him against a cobweb wall. His heart quickened, but he strode forward. The King in Red did not mean to kill him. Dead, he could not go on this mad mission to the north.

Except as a zombie, of course.

He wished he’d thought of that earlier.

The shadows parted, as if he were floating upward through a subterranean lake and suddenly breached the surface. He blinked cobweb from his eyes, and clutched at the retreating liquid dark. He caught a handful, black and quivering like mercury in his palm.

He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the conference room at the end of a long hall, but saw only a closet of red: crimson robes, scarlet suits and ties, shirts the color of blood both fresh and dried.

“Can I get you a drink?” asked the King in Red.

Caleb wheeled around. He stood in a bedroom, large, elegant and sparsely furnished, walled on two sides by smoked windows. Thin metal pillars supported a high, unfinished rock ceiling that glimmered with ghostlights. Bookcases lined the walls, stuffed with red and black leather volumes polished by age and use. The room’s opulence was almost obscured by mess: books piled on desk and floor and furniture, a stack of scrolls collapsed by the chair, a crimson duvet rumpled and askew on the king-sized bed. In an adjoining kitchenette, the King in Red poured reposado tequila into a lowball glass.

“Nothing for me, thanks.”

Kopil emerged from the kitchenette. He snapped his fingers twice and two cubes of ice fell into his tequila.

“You don’t live here,” Caleb said. As he watched, the duvet straightened, books floated to the shelves of their own accord, and piles of scrolls snapped to order. “You have a mansion at Worldsedge. I’ve seen pictures.”

“I have a mansion at Worldsedge,” Kopil acknowledged. “And one in the Skeld Reaches, and a penthouse in Alt Coulumb, and three extensive estates on this coast alone. Plus the occasional island. But do you have any idea how long it takes to commute from Worldsedge? Even flying, I’d waste an hour every day, and I have no interest in spending all morning lurching through a crowded sky. Not to mention the expense, which I assure you would be considerable. Easier to sleep where I work. This room isn’t large, but the whole building belongs to me, so I don’t feel cramped.”

“Not much good for work-life balance.”

“I haven’t been alive for more than seventy years.”

“I see.”

“It’s not so bad.” Kopil swirled tequila and ice. “RKC is a part of me, literally and figuratively. I built this Concern, and I have become a gear moving at its heart—a larger gear than many, but a gear nonetheless. When I sleep I see in my dreams the beast to which I have given birth. Thousands of miles of tunnel and pipe. Millions of people drink of us and live. Billions more spread throughout this mad world draw strength from Dresediel Lex. Men on the other side of the globe, in the southern Gleb, borrow our might to fight their wars. Ignorant children on six continents eat our grain and rejoice, though they do not know our name. So much depends on us. On me. Even at a time like this.”

He didn’t know how to respond, so he tried, “That must be stressful.”

“It’s no more than I asked for—than any of us asked for.” He sighed. “There is one thing you must understand about destroying gods, boy.”

“Only one?”

“You must be ready to take their place.”

“I was thinking something like that myself, at the end of the meeting.” Caleb glanced around the room, wondering how to change the subject without offending his boss. He blinked. “This room doesn’t have any doors.”

“Who needs them?”

“Most people.”

Kopil shrugged, and sipped tequila.

“Sir, why are you sending me north? Lives depend on this mission. But you’re sending a handful of Wardens, a Craftswoman, and a mid-level risk manager. Why not specialists? Why not an army?”

“If we send an army and we didn’t need one, we’ll have left Dresediel Lex weak for no reason, with an enemy loose inside our gates. If an army is needed, an army will be sent. The dead travel fast.”

“In that case why send Mal—I mean, Ms. Kekapania? I doubt she knows anything about pipelines and Tzimet that Ms. Mazetchul doesn’t. Or any of a hundred other Craftsmen and Craftswomen.”

“I’m sending her because I trust you.” The King in Red placed special weight on the last word in that sentence.

“You trust…” Caleb blinked. “Oh.”

“You see the outlines of my design.”

“You trust me. But you don’t trust her.”

Kopil could have been dead indeed for all the reaction he betrayed: a corpse arrayed in funeral red with a cup of sacrificial liquor in his hands. Beyond the windows, Wardens circled above Dresediel Lex.

“You’re sending her because you want to give her a chance to betray you. You think Heartstone sabotaged its own project, and you want to give Mal a chance to fail, or turn on us.”

“Those are two possibilities.”

“You know she and I are romantically involved.”

“I do.”

He saw the rest of it, and cursed himself. “It’s a long journey on to Seven Leaf by Couatl. Lots can happen on the way.”

Ruby stars glimmered in endless night.

“If Ms. Kekapania is a traitor, any observer you sent with her might not reach Seven Leaf Lake. Even their death would tell you nothing. Accidents happen. So you send an observer you think she likes, someone she would hesitate to destroy.”

“You are far too comfortable with conspiracies, Mr. Altemoc.”

“Comfortable isn’t the word I would choose.”

The skull shifted to one side, considering. “Say, in theory, that you have the following problem: the perfect woman for the job at hand was trained by an enemy so bitter that you devoured his Concern so he would no longer trouble you. Say he feels about you the way you feel about him, and say also that he is given to laying long plots and deep plans.”

“Do you really think Alaxic might be involved?”

“Al was always more of your father’s party than of mine.”

He thought of the old man’s face, cast lava red by the Serpents’ light. “Can I speak frankly, sir?”

Kopil waved him on.

“You’re playing long odds. Mal won’t betray the city.”

“If you trust her, why are you afraid to travel with her?”

Caleb had no answer. “I should sleep,” he said at last, turning away. “And prepare.”

There was no exit, so he walked toward the closet again.

“Let me get that for you,” the King in Red called after him.

Caleb did not stop. He tossed the liquid shadow cupped in his palm through the closet door. The shadow spread, like ink spilled in water, to obscure robes and suits and shoes. He stepped through; the black parted for him, and he was gone. Two steps, three, brought him out of the ink and into the boardroom.

In the crimson flat, Kopil watched the darkness recede from his closet.

“Interesting,” he said. If he had eyes, they would have narrowed. After exhausting the few seconds he could spare to puzzle irrelevant mysteries, he snapped his fingers and one of his kitchen walls swung open. Chihuac waited in his office with stacks of paperwork. The night was, unfortunately, still young.

23

Caleb could not sleep in his soulless room. RKC kept emergency quarters at 667 Sansilva for visitors and workers too busy to travel home: efficiencies with all the comfort and warmth of a grain thresher. He tumbled on the hard bed for an hour before he gave up, dressed, and rode the lift down to the street.

Stars menaced the silent city. Even the protesters were mostly asleep, coats bundled to serve as pillows: bow-backed men and broad-shouldered women, young and old, poor and middle-class. Children slept in a clutch on the sidewalk. Ancient men huddled near a flickering portable fire.

Zombies in burlap jumpsuits shambled among the sleepers. They swept the street with broad stiff brooms and speared garbage with rakes and pikes. RKC contracted with a minor Concern to keep the local streets clean, and the revenants came every evening, rain or sleet, protest or riot, earthquake or conflagration, to do their duty.

Sea wind bore the scent of fish and salt off the shark-infested Pax. A few blocks in from shore, the stench of crowds, pavement, and livestock mugged the wind in a dark alley and took its place.

The Wardens guarding RKC’s perimeter shifted to let Caleb pass. He stepped over an unconscious child and turned left toward Muerte Coffee.

The shop’s windows were beacons in the bruised night. Caleb bought a cup of spiced chocolate from a clerk no livelier than the street sweepers, and retreated into grave-cool darkness. He sat on a sidewalk bench and watched dead men move among the sleeping. Chocolate sank a plumb line to his core.

Fifty years ago, at the God Wars’ height, Craftsmen had used a terrible weapon to bring the Shining Empire to its knees. Skies shattered, sand turned to glass, men and women and trees burned so quickly not even their shadows could escape. Those shadows lived still, travelers whispered—pinned to the ruined city by day and wandering at night, wailing after their lost flesh.

He felt like one of those shades, nailed to the city walls, the bench slats, the stone beneath his feet, the cup warm in his hand.

“Hello,” said Temoc beside him.

Caleb let out a strangled squawk and spilled chocolate over his hands onto the sidewalk. Temoc passed him a handkerchief. He dried himself off, returned the sodden cloth, and took another sip before he faced his father.

Temoc sat like a statue on the bench. A coat the size of a tent swallowed his massive body, and a long scarf concealed the bottom half of his face. In the last few weeks he had even let his hair grow, to cover the ritual scars on his scalp. A passing Warden would see only a large, amiable derelict seeking conversation in the small morning hours.

“What are you doing here?”

Temoc sighed and leaned back. The bench sagged with his weight. “Why shouldn’t a man visit his son?”

“Dad.”

“You know, from time to time, see how he’s getting on.”

“Dad.”

“How else am I supposed to brag about you to my friends in the old freedom fighters’ home?”

“Dad.”

Temoc stopped. The corners of his eyes smiled.

“This is a huge risk, coming here,” Caleb said. “Even in disguise.”

“What disguise? This is how I look now. I wander from safe house to safe house, avenging wrongs and fighting the State. It’s not a bad life.”

“You’re a bum, is what you’re saying.”

“A fool, perhaps. In the old days we had holy fools. Madness claimed a few of those who saw the Serpents, and their madness made them sacred. Now the fools are all that’s holy.” He patted his chest. “My life could be worse.”

“Meaning, you could be me, I suppose.”

“What are you talking about? You’re my son. I love you. You work for godless sorcerers who I’d happily gut on the altar of that pyramid”—he pointed to 667 Sansilva—“and you are part of a system that will one day destroy our city and our planet, but I still love you.”

“Thanks, I suppose,” Caleb said. “You realize that if you actually killed the King in Red, this place would be a desert in days. Water isn’t free.”

“It used to rain here more often.”

“Because you sacrificed people to the rain gods.”

“Your system kills, too. You’ve not eliminated sacrifices, you’ve democratized them—everyone dies a little every day, and the poor and desperate are the worst injured.” He pointed at one of the street cleaners. “Your bosses grind them to nothing, until they have no choice but to mortgage their souls and sell their bodies as cheap labor. We honored our sacrifices in the old days. You sneer at them.”

“Yeah? If being sacrificed was such an honor, tell me: how many priests died on the altar?”

They retraced their old arguments without rancor, knife fighters circling one another out of habit, armed only with blunt sticks.

Revenants shambled down the street, sweeping though no dust remained to clean. Silver studs on their wrists glinted in the streetlamps’ light.

“How did the Tzimet get into the water?” Temoc asked.

“Like you don’t know.”

“I’ve spent all night fighting small demons. Saving lives. Do you think so little of me as to imagine I’d do this?”

“It has your signature in foot-high yellow paint. Yours, or one of your friends’.”

Temoc chuckled.

“I missed the part where this was funny.”

“The King in Red’s unholy systems have let demons into the world, and you blame me.”

“Is that why you’re here? To send another message to the King in Red? He almost killed me last time you tried.”

“I knew you would be safe. Besides, if Kopil tries anything, you can defend yourself.”

“Dad,” Caleb began, but he could think of nothing more to say that he wouldn’t have to scream. He stared into the dregs of chocolate at the bottom of his mug. “I couldn’t defend myself against him.”

“You don’t know the strength in your scars. Kopil and I fought each other for days at a time, in the God Wars.”

“He’s grown stronger. He almost crushed me without meaning to.”

Temoc shrugged.

“Why are you here, Dad?”

“To wish you luck.”

“How do you know what I’m about to do?”

“You sleep like a stone most nights. But now you’re fretting over a mug of chocolate. You’re worried about something big. You have a task ahead, and you don’t know whether you’ll be good enough, strong enough, smart enough.”

“You came, defying Wardens and Deathless Kings, to tell me everything will be all right?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Everything won’t be all right. I didn’t turn the water black, but someone did. Likely the same person who blew up North Station, and poisoned Bright Mirror. The Wardens are so busy hunting me they haven’t found a trace of their real enemy. A dark force moves against Dresediel Lex with strength and subtlety. You aren’t safe. No one is. I came to wish you good luck, and warn you to be careful.”

A gust of hot wind stung Caleb’s eyes. He knew even as he blinked that when his vision cleared, Temoc would be gone.

He sat for a while on the empty bench, then set his cup on the curb and shuffled off to his cold bed.

24

Gray dawn brought Caleb bleary and blinking to the pyramid’s parking lot. The previous night’s protesters had swelled to a crowd. Men and women across Sansilva and downtown woke to find their showers would not shower, their faucets would not run. Some sent angry letters by rat. Others came to 667 Sansilva and complained in person.

A line of Wardens separated the crowd from the parking lot. RKC golems and revenants waited behind the Wardens, clanking and moaning whenever a protester staggered too close.

Cheery, middle-aged customer service reps staffed complaint tables just outside the Wardens’ line, listening to those customers who could explain their troubles, and suffering verbal assault from everyone else. No violence yet, so far as Caleb could see. The crowd still shied before the gaze of the dead, and the Wardens.

Mal elbowed toward him through the press of humanity. A golem lumbered to block her way, but she struck its chest with her palm; the air around the golem rippled, and it stumbled aside to let her pass.

Once through the line, she sauntered over to him, smiled, and thrust up her chin in greeting. “Great complaints department you have here. I especially like the guys with the melty faces. Way to make your clients feel at home.”

“Life is hard, undeath is harder. We need someone to keep us safe.”

“I’ll watch out for you.”

“Who will watch out for you?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“You have an exaggerated sense of my abilities.”

“In that case, I’ll have to trust them.” She pointed up.

Caleb’s chest thudded with the approach of massive beating wings. A scimitar shadow passed over him, and another. Couatl circled in the sky, sharks pondering their prey. These were larger than the common Warden’s mount, beasts bred for distance and battle. Baggage studded straps around their bodies: tents, supplies, weapons.

Eight Wardens, come to bear him north to war.

The Couatl swooped lower. Mal frowned. “Our ride’s here.”

The Wardens slung a wide, flat gondola under the largest Couatl for Mal and Caleb, who reclined inside as they flew north. The rising sun burned off the morning fog, but factories and foundries had already lit their fires. An industrial haze cushioned sky and earth, and did not abate until the flying caravan cleared the northern reaches of the suburbs.

Their course curved west over a broken-scab carpet of farms: acres of orange groves, miles of avocados, artichokes, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, grass pasture and waving wheat, all green, all growing, in defiance of the desert two hours’ flight away. Eight-tenths of the fresh water from Bay Station went directly to these fields, where revenants and colossal machines planted and harvested the food that fed not only Dresediel Lex, but cities across the continent and beyond the Pax. A few sapient men and women lived on these farms, tenants for the Concerns that owned the land, but for the most part the fields belonged to iron and the dead.

After three hours of northward flight the farms gave way to rolling hills, the hills to mountains. Rather than follow the First Highway up the coast toward Regis, they curved inland and soared between snowcapped peaks. The air grew cold; Caleb wrapped himself in an alpaca blanket, and Mal produced a long, fur-lined leather jacket from her backpack and draped it over her shoulders. Wind whipped the jacket’s tail behind her as they dove into a ravine.

“I’ve never seen the mountains from up here before,” he said as they flew past temples hung from sheer cliffs by forgotten sages.

“Have you seen them at all? I thought you were a city boy.”

“When I was too young to live in town by myself, Mom brought me out here on her business trips.”

“She raised you alone?”

“Temoc sure didn’t help. You know how it is,” he said, though he realized with a pang of guilt that, being an orphan, she might not. “Mom’s trips into the Badlands took months at a time, but she brought me along anyway. Better than leaving me in DL to get into trouble.”

“What did she do out there?”

“Research, mostly. Interview people, take notes. She works for the Collegium, studying nomadic Quechal tribes in the mountains and the desert.”

“Exciting.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “For the most part that meant wandering through the Badlands, following a bunch of people with a host of diseases any doctor could cure with a handful of pills and halfway decent nutrition. Life out there is a tapestry of danger: Scorpionkind and snakes, desert wolves, trickster spirits and wandering godlets who’ll burn you if you don’t worship them. Then she’d come back to the city and write books about deep truths the tribes know that the rest of us have forgotten. Seems silly to me. I always thought we had life better in DL than they do in the desert—at least as far as the lack of constant danger is concerned.”

She rolled onto her back, laced her fingers behind her head and looked up into the scaled belly of the beast that bore them. “Maybe that’s what the tribes know. The danger, I mean. How often do we really feel close to death anymore? Everyone in Dresediel Lex is wrapped in cotton: ladies worry about a patch of sagging skin, pale women want to be darker, dark women want to be paler. The men are no better. You live in Fisherman’s Vale; you must see them jogging shirtless in the mornings, bodies sculpted for no purpose grander than vanity. In the Badlands nobody has the luxury to worry about stupid shit like that.”

He struck his own stomach, which was flat but hardly sculpted. “I thought that way until I saw my fourth person die of a blood infection.”

“What about the five hundredth person dying on the streets because they don’t have a job, or can’t afford a doctor, or water?”

“Those same people wouldn’t last two weeks in the desert.”

“And you would? If you think we should kill everyone who can’t survive in the wild, you want a lot of blood on your hands.”

He stilled the dozen sharp replies that rushed to his tongue. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve fought this stuff over and over with my father. It’s hard to talk about it without getting emotional.”

“It’s a sensitive subject. There are no easy answers.”

“No,” he said after a long hesitation. “I guess not.” Their Couatl rose toward and through the low thin layer of clouds. Water vapor flecked Caleb’s face and lashes and wet his hair. Three wingbeats, four, and the clouds gave way to unbroken sky. The sun warmed them; it cast Caleb half in shade and left Mal in light.

She gathered her legs and stood, slowly, gripping a gondola cable for support. Her coat flared like wings. She wore a tan shirt open at the collar. A row of short scars marred the skin at her collarbone. “Here,” she said, “let me show you what I mean.”

He realized what she was about to do an instant before she released the cable and tumbled off the side of the gondola.

With a wordless cry he leapt for her; his stomach wrenched and his hand shot out. He reached, grasping, desperate, into the clouds.

Too slow, he knew in his bones, too slow, even as a firm grip clamped around his wrist. The sudden weight almost tugged him from the basket. He looked over the edge, and laughed in relief. Mal dangled from his arm. Her coat whipped and snapped with the speed of their passage. Sharp joy gleamed in her eyes.

“See?” she said, unperturbed by the open sky and the mile’s drop. She shouted to be heard over the rush of wind. “Don’t you feel alive?”

“I feel terrified,” he shouted back. “And angry.”

“Your heart’s beating, you’re breathing deep, you’re desperate. Have you ever felt that way in Dresediel Lex, except when you were running after me?”

“What would you have done if I didn’t catch you?”

“It’s a long way down. I would have thought of something.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’re not the first to say it.”

He pulled her back into the gondola. When his arm trembled and his grip almost failed, she grabbed a rope and pulled herself the rest of the way aboard.

“All things considered,” he said when they were both safely reclining once more, “I think I prefer the cotton-padded life.”

She shrugged. He remembered chasing her across rooftops, and the chill in his heart as he flew.

After a silence, he said: “What do you think went wrong at Seven Leaf?”

She didn’t answer at first, but he refused to change the subject again, and she relented. “Animals, maybe, or a raid from the Scorpionkind, though there aren’t many of them in the mountains and it’d take a larger clutch than I’ve ever seen to hurt Seven Leaf Station. Could be a spirit rebellion, but we bound all the local ghosts and gods in the lake before we started pumping.”

“Treachery?”

“Possible. From within, or without.”

“So what’s our plan?”

“Fly north. See what awaits us. Deal with it.” She leaned back and let her eyes drift shut. “No sense worrying about the game before we see the cards.”

Caleb didn’t agree, but neither did he argue. Mal’s breath settled, and she slept. He sat a few feet away from her, and tried to think as the world passed below.

25

An hour before nightfall, the Wardens guided their mounts down to survey a broad forest clearing. A brook bordered the clearing to the east, and the forty-foot-wide stump of a magisterium tree towered in the clearing’s center. The Couatls’ approach set resting deer and small birds to flight. The Wardens saw no danger, and made camp in the fork of a spreading root, between stump and water.

Magisterium grew in deep mountains, at glacial speeds. The living wood was strong, and stronger after death—its sticky sap set fast, and dried smooth and hard as stone. Only lightning and Craft could topple such trees, breaking them before the sap stiffened. Felled magisterium was valuable: carpenters could shape the wood into the bones and masts of ships, lighter than metal, tougher, and resistant to most Craft. Prospectors combed the mountains every year after winter storms, seeking fallen wood to sell.

Too old and weathered for the most desperate prospector, the stump by which the RKC team camped was well into its third century of wind and rain and insects’ futile attempts at tunneling. The Couatl nested on the stump’s flat top, and rubbed their hides against splinters sharp as steel nails.

Caleb built a fire, which Mal lit with a glare, and they cooked and ate a simple, hearty meal, tortillas and cheese and dried meat heated over the flame. They did not talk much. No local beast or bird dared return to the clearing—afraid of the campers, or more likely of the Couatl. Caleb swatted a couple mosquitos at sunset, but even those made only a halfhearted effort.

After they ate, Caleb leaned back, patted his stomach, produced a coin and walked it up and down his fingers. “I’m bored.”

“I’m sorry,” Mal said, “that our covert mission isn’t exciting enough for you.”

“Oh, I’m paralyzed with fear. But I don’t like paralysis.” He produced a deck of cards from his jacket pocket. “What do you say to a game?”

“A game?”

“Poker.”

“With only the two of us?”

“What about you guys?” He called to the Wardens across the campfire. Their quicksilver masks warped and reflected the flames, transforming blank features into the gates of hell. He raised the cards. “A game?”

The leader of the Warden band, a blocky young woman whose badge numbered 3324, was the first to speak: “We’re on duty, sir.”

“You aren’t all planning to stand watch at the same time, are you? A few can play while the others guard.”

“We have to remain on duty in the field.” She raised one gloved hand and tapped the spot on her mask where her cheek would have been. Her glove disappeared into the silver. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“I don’t need to see your faces to take your souls,” he said as he slid the cards from the pack. “And don’t call me sir.” The rattlesnake shuffle of card against card sounded small and alien in the clearing.

3324 acquiesced without further prodding. Three of her squad mates joined, for a table of six, while two slept and two more stood guard. All the Wardens bore the same initial numbers on their badge.

“Does that mean something? The thirty-three?”

“We’re an extraterritorial unit,” said 3324.

“Arrest authority, but no responsibility to arrest,” added the Warden beside her.

“Soldiers,” Mal said, with a sour voice.

“No,” she replied. “We’re Wardens who don’t always have the luxury of bringing our suspects home to trial.”

“A fine distinction. I’m sure your victims respect it.”

If 3324 reacted, her mask gave no sign. “Sometimes we have ugly assignments. Sometimes the world is ugly. I’d be overjoyed if all I had to do was direct traffic.”

“I doubt it.”

She shrugged. “Doubt what you like. But until that day, we’re stuck with jobs like this—in the forest, riding to confront an unknown threat, probably outgunned, with two civilians in tow. No disrespect.”

“You chose this life,” Mal said. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe you when you say you’d be happy to give it up.”

“I chose to serve. Turns out this is what I’m good for. What we’re good for.” She motioned to her men, who sat statue-still and did not acknowledge the statement. “We wanted to serve our city, and we have talents for last-ditch action, and violence. The jobs that no one wants to do, but must be done. So here we are. Serving.”

Mal opened her mouth, and Caleb almost interrupted her, afraid of what she might say. But he did not, and she settled for: “So you serve.” And, “Let’s play cards.”

“Let’s.”

“We can’t keep calling you all by numbers,” Caleb said, relieved at the opportunity to change the subject. “Thirty-three twenty-four is a mouthful.”

“You may call me Four. Within our team, the final number is enough.”

“Pleasure to meet you.” Caleb removed a folded silk cloth from his jacket pocket, and spread it over a flat span of earth. He dealt the cards first into eight piles, one for each of the eight directions, then stacked the piles atop one another and shuffled the deck eight times. His heart stilled, and he forgot that he sat in the middle of the Drakspine, hundreds of miles from the city of his birth. He set aside Mal’s argument with the Warden, and his own fear. The cards carried a world with them. “Three-faced goddess, we call you to us.” The formula burned his tongue; the cards stung his fingers as they ripped pieces from his soul. Quechal designs covered the cards’ backs: the Twin Serpents twining a woman with a threefold face, a goddess without a name. As he shuffled, the designs began to glow.

He laid the deck in the center of the silk, and Four touched it with the first finger of her right hand; the Warden beside her followed, and after him another, and then Mal. With each touch, the designs brightened. The players gave shreds of themselves, their hearts, minds, lives, loves, patches of the dust and lightning that formed them.

The light detached from the deck, and, rising, assumed a woman’s form, half-turned away: a tempting and inviting figure, a face that would be beautiful if Caleb could see it fully. The goddess sprinted beyond her worshippers’ reach, teasing them with gifts withdrawn at their moment of greatest need.

She hovered over the makeshift table in the wilderness, small and perfect as a porcelain doll. At Andrej’s late in the evening, where kingdoms were won or lost at hazard, she towered, glorious, a green light at the end of a long pier that he might pursue and embrace to drown.

Caleb dealt the first two cards to each player, and waited as the betting began with Four. He glanced at his cards—two of swords and eight of wands. Just as well. A bad hand was a fine way to open the evening. Ease in.

The goddess assumed their features as they bet: Mal’s taunting smile, the square solidity of Four’s shoulders, one Warden’s back, another’s delicate wrist, a third’s laugh. Caleb folded, and watched.

Four won the first hand, with twos full of jacks. Mal had a nine and a seven, and grinned as the power left her. Had she meant to lose the hand, to make the Wardens bold?

He shuffled and dealt again.

Time stopped for them, though the blue sky darkened to black and a jeweler’s dusting of stars emerged. The goddess grew, all things in turn to her worshippers, demanding, cajoling, reprimanding. The fire burned so low Caleb had to squint to see his cards.

Play was a simple matter of calculating odds and finding tells: Four touched her chin when a card turned to her advantage. Eight, jovial and immense, flexed his cards between his fingers when he held a strong hand. Mal was hard to read. She played with reckless abandon, yet seemed to win important hands and lose meaningless ones.

Once he crossed with her, riding king-queen in swords, and she followed him in a rising spiral of raises. They pressed against each other with the game as a thin cotton sheet between them, disguising nothing though it covered all.

He won, with a straight to her two pair. She laughed savagely as the goddess ripped her from herself.

They all had won and lost enough for one night. The game broke, and with a sigh the goddess dissolved, relinquishing the scraps of her divinity to the players.

Caleb closed his eyes as she entered him. Lightning danced through his blood, burned through his nerves. He would live forever, deeds resounding through legend.

He opened his eyes as if for the first time in years, so fresh did the world seem, and so raw.

The cards lay like inert slips of stiff paper on wrinkled silk.

Silence echoed in the mountain heights—not an absence of noise, but a presence in itself, a medium that endured human intrusion as the sea endures the passage of a ship. Before the ship came, there was the sea; as the ship passes, the sea rolls against the hull. When the ship is gone the sea remains. Without the sea, there could be no ships. Without the ships, there could be no sea, Caleb thought, not knowing what that might mean.

He listened to the silence above the Drakspine in the dark, beside the dwindling fire.

The players wandered off. The Wardens relieved the watch or took their rest, and Mal faded into the night while Caleb stowed and purified the cards.

Searching the campsite after his rituals were done, at first he could not find her. The Wardens stood guard or slept; those who acknowledged him did so with curt, quiet nods. He thought about Four, by the fireside, and about duty.

He was about to call Mal’s name, when he looked up.

She sat on the edge of the magisterium stump, her profile lit by campfire and stars. She watched the sky.

She must have heard him climb the tree’s gnarled roots. But when he stood beside her, hands scraped and arms aching with exertion, she did not look away from the stars and mountains. Couatl slept behind them in a coiled heap, wings furled over winding bodies. Long crocodile-toothed heads rested against cold, pliant scales.

“I never took you for a religious man,” she said, lost and faint as if she wandered beyond the horizon of a dream.

“I’m not.” He waited for her to turn, but she did not. “My father’s the last of the Eagle Knights, a priest of the old gods, and I work for the man who kicked his gods to the curb. More religion is the last thing I need in my life.”

“Yet you follow a goddess.”

He laughed, but she did not, so he stopped. “I wouldn’t call that a religion.”

“What would you call it?”

“The Lady of the Cards,” and he heard the capitals and wished he could unsay them, “lives between the players of a game. She’s their souls mingled, and has no power save over the game. The game ends, and she leaves. Not much of a goddess.”

“Yet you worship her.”

“Not really.”

“You observe her rites and rules in the dealing of a hand or the shuffling of cards. You worship her, sure as a ballplayer sixty years ago worshipped the Twins or Ili of the Bright Sails or Qet Sea-Lord or Exchitli. For you, at least, the card game never ends. You’re an occasional priest—pledged to a goddess who only exists occasionally.”

“You’re philosophical tonight.”

“Maybe I am.”

She faced north, toward a palpable darkness on the horizon, where the curtain of stars faded and failed.

“Looks like Craftwork,” he said.

“That’s Seven Leaf Lake. We’ll reach it before noon tomorrow.” She spoke with a measured tone that could have been excitement or fear or anger masquerading as control.

“Good.” Starshine was a potent source of power for Craft, rawest of all raw materials: starshine filtered through human mind became the stuff of souls, and Craftswomen could use it to accomplish wonders and great blasphemies. Whatever force had seized Seven Leaf, it would be less powerful at noon, with the stars hidden, than at any other time of day.

“That blot must be miles across. Is Seven Leaf supposed to pull down so much light?”

“No. The station’s drawing more power than it was designed to use. That narrows the possibilities. Narrows them down to one, actually: someone is inside, working against us.”

“Not someone,” he said after a while.

“Excuse me?”

“Our enemy isn’t faceless, is he? Pushing the station beyond its limits like that takes real Craft.”

“There are many trained Craftsmen in the world. They’re not all good people.”

“Sure.” The dark spot bled into the sky, growing as he watched. “But this one took over your station without raising a single alarm. This is an inside job. I’d wager a tenth of my soul you know who did it, or can guess.”

Her legs dangled over the edge of the stump. Her feet were bare, long and narrow, their bones slender. She looked back over her shoulder at him. “What if I do?”

“Tell me.” He sat down beside her. Tree frogs sang a senseless throbbing song.

“I tell you, and you tell the King in Red.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“Fine,” Caleb said. “Trust me, or don’t. I’m going to bed.”

He was about to climb down and abandon her to the stars and sleeping serpents, but she put out a hand and stopped him.

“Her name is Allesandre Olim,” she said. “Allie. She was the strongest Craftswoman at Seven Leaf. She was eager for the assignment. I guess now we know why.”

That name floated back to him through time, from tunnels and caves and a lake of lava. “Allesandre. Alaxic’s aide?”

“Yes.”

“I met her once. She didn’t seem insane at the time. Precise, dangerous, yes. But this…”

“I know.” She pointed again to the corruption of the stars. “But there it is. She was the best Craftswoman at Seven Leaf by far. A genius. No one else in the station could have overcome her, or done this.”

“Can you reason with her? Talk her down?”

“I doubt it. She’s gone too far. That blot’s larger than a living Craftswoman could handle without going mad. If people want to use more, they have to die, like your boss.”

“Maybe she died.”

“Death takes time. There are classes, support groups, premortem exercises. Allie’s alive, but her mind is a splinter caught in a tornado. She’ll tear through anything in her way, but she has no control.”

“That doesn’t sound good for us.”

“We’ll be outmatched when we reach Seven Leaf, and overpowered.”

“So we call for backup. The King in Red’s forces can be here by morning.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You heard your boss, in that meeting. If I succeed, Heartstone’s safe. I’m safe. If I call your boss, I admit failure, and everything that goes with it. He already blames us for this mess. He’ll take his revenge, scour Heartstone from the foundations up. None of my friends and colleagues will survive.” She tore strips of moss from the trunk, and threw them over the side: centuries of decomposition undone by a fingernail scrape. “It’s better this way. I succeed, if I can. If not, the King in Red and his armies can be here in hours, and ride to the city’s rescue.”

“But you’ll die.”

“I don’t care,” she said in a monotone as striking as a scream.

“I do.”

In the dark her eyes deepened.

“Yes,” she said. “You do.”

“You’re not worried for yourself. You’re worried for me.”

“Worried,” she said, and laughed at the word’s poverty. “The Wardens knew what they were getting into when they took the job. You heard Four down there. I know why I’m here. But you didn’t ask for this.”

“I knew what I was getting into.”

“Whatever you thought chasing me would bring you, this is worse. I don’t know what weapons Allie will throw against us. The Wardens are scared. I’m scared. You’ve never been in a war of Craft before. You’ll die, if you’re lucky, and dying hurts.” She looked away from him. “I don’t want you to die, Caleb.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised by that.”

The uncertainty left her voice. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have let you come.”

“I can handle myself.”

“Oh,” she said with a small laugh like bells. “Can you.”

Blue flames flashed from her eyes, and he froze. His hand refused to twitch, his chest to rise or fall. Sweat stung his eyes, but he could not blink.

“This is a taste of what she’ll use against us tomorrow,” she said. “You see why I’m worried. I want to protect you. If I must, I’ll knock you out and leave you here, warded and sleeping, until this is settled.”

His starved lungs spasmed. Time beat slow. Air pressed against his palms: air subtly ribbed like the surface of a plank of wood. Her Craft had bound him in strong cords woven spider-fine.

But he could feel the cords. What he could feel, he could touch, and what he could touch, he could seize.

A chill spread through his scars. He closed his fists, and the paralysis broke. He held two fistfuls of stinging nettle, but the relief of being able to blink and breathe was so strong he forgot the pain. Her Craft glimmered in his grip.

He looked up. Mal had recoiled into a fighting crouch, her eyes wide.

“What” was all she could manage.

“Well,” he said, “did you expect me to let you strangle me for my own good?”

“You,” she said when she tried to speak again.

“I’m coming with you. I might die. I’m okay with that.” As he spoke he realized he was not lying. “I like the thought of standing beside you. Whatever happens.”

“You,” she repeated.

“I have your Craft, yes.” The scars on his fingers bent the blue light of her power like lenses. “I didn’t think you would be surprised. I’ve done it before. Remember the bar? Dancing?”

“You’re glowing.”

He looked down. Cerulean lines twisted about his torso. They shone through his shirt like moonlight. “That’s a hell of a lot of power to use just to knock someone out.”

“Those aren’t Craftsmen’s glyphs.”

“They aren’t glyphs at all. Like I said at Andrej’s. They’re scars.”

“High Quechal.”

“Yes.”

“You’re an Eagle Knight.” He heard awe in her voice, and it sickened him. “Your father—”

“My father’s an Eagle Knight, and a priest, and a terrorist, and a bunch of other things I’m not.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Scars glowed from his skin, curving and intricate: Qet Sea-Lord bleeding the oceans, Exchitli the Sun falling into the Serpents’ fangs to seal the bargain that made the world. The Hero Twins blazed above his heart.

He released her Craft.

Darkness bloomed purple. He closed his eyes, and waited alone in the dark for a slow count of ten. A warm pressure settled against his chest. He recognized her calloused fingers, and the hiss of her breath when she touched his scars.

“Eagle Knights,” he said with eyes still closed, “used the gods’ power in battle. My father’s the last. When he was ten, he knelt at the peak of the pyramid where I work today, and carved the symbols of their order into his skin. Last step of the initiation. Some of his blood’s still in the altar stone there.”

“Gods, Caleb. What did he do to you?”

“When I was ten.” He opened his eyes. Her face was inches from his, but distant as the moon’s. “Well—” He tried again, and again stopped. Words laced with acid formed in his stomach. They hurt rising to his tongue. “When I was ten, he left my mother and me. But he didn’t want me unprotected.” He grimaced. “So he gave me the most powerful gift he knew. He drugged me at our last dinner, and came for me in the night with a black glass knife. Mom found us as he was finishing. Blood everywhere.”

One of her hands clutched his shoulder; the other cupped his ribs. She did not draw him to her, but her strength creaked his bones.

“He thinks he did right by me. I think he’s a fanatic. But the scars give me strength. They let me touch Craft, grab it, bend it. I’ve never liked to use them in my work, because I didn’t want to owe him anything. Until now. Until you. My father’s madness has never brought me anything, but at least it’ll let me stand at your side.”

The river rolled south. Sentinel stars stared down.

“Say something,” he whispered.

She could have walked away, as she had done so many times before, as he might have himself under the same circumstances. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Worse was for her to stand, hands on his shoulders, watching him with that wasteland expression between concern and fascination and terror, as if he were a traffic accident or a shark-gnawed carcass on a beach.

But terror receded, and fascination. Her mouth closed, her shoulders sagged, the corners of her eyes and her grip on his body grew soft. He saw himself in her eyes; she saw herself in his.

A shell closed over that silence, sealing it away. She stepped back, cupped her chin in her hand, and said, “I have an idea.”

26

Morning was cold and overcast, the trees mist-haunted. A caul of fog covered river and earth, transforming the black magisterium stump into a dour promontory. Couatl woke and stretched their wings.

The Wardens moved in simple, straight lines, breaking camp, packing tents and bedrolls. They hung weapons near their saddles: wicked hooks on long chain, barbed javelins, automatic crossbows, razor-edged silver discs of many sizes. The weapons whispered sharp words when Caleb drew near: flay, flense, shatter, twist.

Even Mal was grim this morning. “Are you ready?” he asked her as they settled into the gondola. She shook herself back from a distant lonely place to answer: “As ever.” She gripped his arm through his jacket. He set his hand on hers; at an unseen signal from Four, the Couatl surged skyward.

The morning pall did not retreat before the rising sun. The shadow dome, their destination, grew larger on the horizon with each wingbeat.

All morning they traveled up a narrow ravine between snow-edged ridges. Two plates of the earth’s crust jutted against each other here, buckling and crushing down slow generations. A river ran along the cleft, fed by the falls from Seven Leaf Lake, and their flight traced the river to its source.

The shadow-dome was miles across and just as high. It curved immense ahead, surface mottled like different oils mixed. Dark currents twitched within as they approached. “Why does it look different colors?” Caleb asked.

“Allie can’t watch everywhere at once,” Mal said. “She sees her world in pieces. When she peers at a section of the dome, it darkens.”

“You still think she’s the one we’re fighting?”

“Yes.”

After a pause, he asked: “Why do they move randomly? It’d be safer for her to have a system.”

“She probably thinks she does. Her mind’s warped, trying to contain all that power.”

“So we’re fighting a mad, almost omnipotent sorceress.”

“Yes.”

“Great.”

“For what it’s worth, madness tends to be a disadvantage in this sort of thing.”

“Glad to hear it.”

She sat in fierce profile, watching.

Caleb pondered his current predicament. A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. He lived in contradiction, and in fear.

His father would not approve.

The night before, Mal had knelt beside him in her tent and painted figures on his skin with silver ink that burned when wet, but cooled as it dried. Even now he could trace the outline of her sigils on his chest and arms and shoulders and back, the ink cold as Craft, a pattern to complement his scars. His war paint, his mark as her protector.

He laughed.

“What?”

“I’ve gone from manager to knight in two days. I think I deserve a bump in salary.”

“I’ll recommend you if we pull this off.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to write your boyfriend a recommendation.”

“You’re my boyfriend now?”

“This is our second date.”

“Some date. Fighting for our lives.”

“We’ll be fine,” he said, without conviction.

“Yes.” She sounded no more certain. “Next time, we’ll go someplace nice.”

“Sure,” he said as they passed into darkness.

The world changed, like walking on a tidal beach: one step dry and warm and yielding, the next wet, cold, firm. The pleasant sunlit world faded. Mountains surrounded them, crags old as the frame of the earth. Trees shivered in the wind of their passing, restless shades rising from hungry sleep. This was the world immortal. It would endure man’s scrabbling on its surface, and rejoice when the last city crumbled.

Was this how Craftsmen saw the universe? So pitiless, and dark?

Shadowy cords throttled the air overhead as the Couatl dove for the tree line. Where the cords passed, they left silence solemn as the halls of an ancient tomb.

The Couatl threaded through magisterium trees toward the falls: water rushing in torrents down an indomitable cliff. Up the bare rock they flew, until with a final surge of tired wings they crested the ridge and reached the lake.

Seven Leaf stretched before them, twenty miles at least from western to eastern shore and mountain-ringed.

Caleb had never seen so much fresh water in one place. Dresediel Lex was a desert city, no matter how it pretended to temperate ease. In his childhood he had played among cactus spines, and the forest he knew the best was the Stonewood, eons dead. An embarrassment of wealth lay below him, fresh water from horizon to horizon, salvation to his thirsty city.

The black lightning of Allie’s mind flickered and lanced above the waters. The sun was a pale ghost. Sickly blue-green luminescence shone from everywhere and nowhere at once, casting no shadows—undigested remnants of light, vomited up by their adversary.

Shade-wrapped Seven Leaf Station shimmered atop the water: a silver dome in the lake’s center, surrounded by a metal superstructure in the shape of a six-pointed star. Three rings of Craft circled the entire station, crackling with flame. Domes and towers blurred and flexed, sprouting annexes, buttresses, and arches that crumbled in moments, shining upside-down through time.

The Couatl sped toward the station. Their pinions carved vicious arcs in the gloom. When they crossed the outermost of the three Craft circles the world flashed white, and before the light faded they crossed the second and third in quick succession, a flare of black, a strain of music calling Caleb down a deep tunnel beyond which unfamiliar stars glared into a desolate abyss. Wards on the Couatl’s scales popped and hissed and sparked, and gouted smoke that stank of ozone and burning flesh.

They landed on a flat stone platform at the station’s edge. Four was the first to hit the ground, followed by One, Three, and Seven; Mal followed, as did Caleb, and the remaining Wardens reared the Couatl back into the air.

No sooner were the Couatl airborne than tentacle arms a hundred feet long burst from the lake. Most grabbed for the Couatl and missed, but two carved deep trenches in the stone platform where Caleb, Mal, and the Wardens stood.

Caleb stumbled back, slipped on the slick stone and fell. A tentacle curved overhead, dark against the gray sky. It struck, and Caleb flinched, but when he opened his eyes he was still alive. The tentacle twitched on the landing platform, severed halfway down its length. Four stood above him, ichor dripping from a long black blade she sheathed again at her side.

Three more tentacles rose to replace the fallen limb. Mal pulled Caleb to his feet, and they ran, following the Wardens down a long catwalk toward the central dome.

Couatl wove and rolled through the sky, dancing amid a storm of tentacles. Caleb had seen his share of human brawls, brutish and brief: breaking, snapping, tearing, that was how man fought man. The Couatl and the shadow-arms were made things, perfect mechanisms. They dueled with an artist’s precision.

Tzimet scuttled out of the water onto the catwalk, slick curved claws scratching metal. Four and her comrades struck them like a hammer, so fast their forms were lost in movement. Four’s hands burned with green flame as she punched through a Tzimet’s abdomen; Seven tossed a silver ball down the catwalk, and the ball shed thin rays of light that shredded shadow and black water.

This is what we’re good for, Four had said across the campfire. Last-ditch action, and violence.

They carved a hole in the horde, and running, Caleb and Mal followed.

The world warped: a phantom of Sansilva Boulevard lay under Caleb’s feet, broad and pyramid-flanked, and he would have run down that road into the lake had he not fixed his eyes on Mal and followed her instead. He fell a thousand feet from a sky-castle onto a blasted desert, but he followed Mal and the desert melted.

The dreams that nipped at Caleb’s mind turned ugly as he neared the dome. Demons gnawed his entrails, and peeled Mal’s skin in long strips that unraveled as she ran.

Footsteps rang on steel.

Light scattered Caleb’s illusions. Overhead, Wardens loosed lances of flame, spinning discuses of silver, and brilliant hooks against Allie’s tentacles. The dome’s surface twisted the firefight into a funhouse hell.

Four reached the dome and rushed through without pause, leaving only a ripple in reflected flames—the walls were not made of glass or chrome, but water.

Caleb grabbed Mal’s hand, and they stepped inside together.

Water enclosed him, and let him pass. When he opened his eyes, he was dry, and alone.

Darkness illuminated a wrecked room: broken tables, upturned chairs, scattered consoles and implements of Craft. A web of twisted wire and bent pipe filled the chamber, and a woman sat in the center of that web, cradled like an idol in an old priest’s hand. Caleb recognized her.

At their last meeting Allesandre had been clipped and precise, level as a frozen river. Her ice had thawed into a flood. Glyphs burned from her skin, marred her face with talon patterns, ringed her brow like a crown of knives. Tatters of a dark wool suit hung from her body. Eternities wrapped around themselves in her eyes.

Misshapen lumps of human flesh hung from her metal web, and corpses sprawled beneath her on the floor.

His gut turned, and he almost turned with it, almost fled back through the water curtain. Fear, more than bravery, prevented him. She would not spare him just because he tried to run. His only chance at survival lay ahead.

Her mocking smile cracked open. Blue light sparked between dagger teeth. “It’s been a long time.”

“Allesandre,” Caleb said. “Stop this.”

“Why?” the Craftswoman said pleasantly. “You put me here, asked me for this. You and your master.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t ask you for anything. I’ve only seen you once.” She did not answer. “Where are the others?”

“Your companions are dead. I let you live.”

Caleb heard flesh crisp to ash. Mal screamed. Craft-born hallucinations. Witchcraft. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m here to fix the water. Don’t try to stop me.”

Fire burned in her eyes. “Come, if you dare. Wrap your hands around my neck and kill me.”

A trick. Of course. Yet he felt her throat in his right hand, flesh and tendon and bone. Squeeze. Kill. No. He hadn’t moved. His hand was empty. He was alone in the dark.

“Come,” she said. “I’m waiting.” A flash of lightning cast her and the web of wire and the corpses in chiaroscuro. Four silhouettes hovered in the air about her, shadow cutouts contorted in pain.

Four shadows. Why four? Why did those silhouettes seem familiar?

“Where’s Mal?” he asked. He tried to look away from Allesandre, but his eyes remained fixed on her.

“You have no power here,” she said.

He ignored her, and focused instead on the feeling in his right hand. Skin, yes, but too hard and calloused for a throat, bones too thin for a spine. He recognized the meat of a palm, and slender strong fingers wrapped around his own.

“Mal,” he said, louder this time.

“No one can help you. We two are alone, the only human beings for miles. Face me and fight, or I will destroy you as you look away.”

Look away. His nerves locked against him. Air froze in his chest. Waves of blood beat on the shore of his body. His scars ran cold.

The foundation of the world shook, or he did, or both. Cords bound his mind. He gripped them, and they fell loose.

Mal stood beside him, holding his right hand, her gaze fixed on Allesandre. Glyphs burned from the open collar of her shirt. “You presume to dictate terms to me?” Her voice was sharp and fearsome. “He was no part of this. I will end you for killing him.”

She thought he was dead. Overhead he heard a rustle of motion, smelled ozone as claws of Craft ripped through empty space. He recognized the Wardens by their speed. They darted between pipes and wires; one leapt at Allesandre only to be swept aside by an invisible force. Their attacks were out of joint, uncoordinated. A pair struck at once and a single wave of fire threw them back. A tangle of black arms snared Seven, who fought free, and the same trap caught Three seconds later.

They fought with courage and desperation. They fought as if each one, alone, was the last bulwark between Dresediel Lex and doom.

Caleb closed his eyes, and saw the barbs of Craft sunk into the Wardens’ minds, and Mal’s.

Mal stepped forward and became inhuman, tall and lean and sharp, an eidolon of smooth spiked bone. Her fingers almost slipped from his grasp.

Almost.

He pulled against her with his scars. Allesandre’s illusion bent. Mal fought him, her hand a knife’s blade that cut his palm, a flame caged in his grip, but he pressed harder. The pain grew. He cried out, but before he could let go, the illusion broke.

Mal froze. Blood dripped from the cuts in Caleb’s hand. A drop at the curve of his smallest finger welled, swelled, fell.

She turned to him. Her eyes had been open, but now she saw.

“Caleb,” she whispered, and the bone and crystal melted from her. Her look of surprise changed first to joy, then to predatory confidence. Her skin chilled to his touch. She closed her eyes, and turned on Allesandre.

“Allie,” she said, “that was clever. But not clever enough.”

She advanced, and Caleb followed her.

A hissing serpent of frozen flames encircled them, but it shattered at a wave of Mal’s hand. Sweat and condensation gleamed on her forehead. Her slow and shallow breath turned the air to fog. They walked into the jaws of a shark with jagged crystal teeth the size of men. Mal frowned, and, closing, the teeth melted to raindrops and splashed cool on his face.

Skewering thorns blossomed into roses, which fell upon them heavy and suffocating only to take wing and rise as butterflies, which became a swarm of bees swept away in a rush of wind.

The world ran taut as a violin string.

Lightning-haloed Allesandre blazed with hidden fire.

The night before, Caleb sat in Mal’s tent naked to the waist. Her brush tickled the back of his neck.

“Duels of the Craft,” she said, “are fought on many levels. Mind and soul are two battlefields, the body another, time a fourth, and most of the others make little sense if you’re not a Craftsman. The world is an argument, and like any argument there are many ways to win or lose. You can force your opponent to contradict herself. You can point out her fallacies, her false dichotomies, her exaggerations and distortions of reality. Our authority from the King in Red threatens Allie’s control over the station. She’ll attack the bond between Seven Leaf and RKC, claiming independence. The contracts between the station and RKC are strong, though. I can turn them against her.”

“And once you do that, you win.”

“Ordinarily.” Her brush slid silver along his neck. “If this were a case before a judge, in a Court of Craft, supported by precedent and dread command. Out here…” She trailed off, and drew a spiral at the base of his spine. “There’s an easy way to win any argument, no matter the quality of your position—you kill the person with whom you disagree. When she sees I’m about to win, she’ll strike with every thaum of her power. I won’t be able to stop her. I’ll have fought my way to exhaustion already. A simple, blunt attack will go through me like an arrow through a paper wall.” Her brush spun in place to articulate a dot. The ink dried cool on his skin, and in his soul. Closing his eyes, he saw the night inside his skull painted with her diagrams. “That’s where you come in.”

Allesandre swelled with rage. Wires twisted like octopus arms around her, and her mouth shaped words in demonic tongues. She reared, serpentine.

Lightning poured down upon them like water from a height.

The lightning slammed into Mal’s protective wards, and would have burned through if its power had nowhere else to go.

Lines of silver paint flared on Caleb’s skin, and the scars on his chest and back and arms flared too.

Thunder riveted his mind. Power battered the cords of his being. His heart stopped.

Caleb held Allesandre’s might as a rider holds reins.

He knelt, and touched the lightning to the metal deck of Seven Leaf Station.

The bottom dropped out of his soul, and he fell into the station, into the water, into and through Allesandre’s defenses. She threw her head back. Her skeleton sparked through her skin; she screamed, long and high-pitched, until her own throat strangled her and the world collapsed in rushing water.

The dome, built to withstand storm and earthquake and divine wrath, gave way. Thousands of gallons of water fell on Caleb and Mal, on the Wardens, on Allesandre in her wire web.

Caleb collapsed to the deck. Time disappeared in the roar and rush. Gravity failed, and he grabbed for anything firm. His hands closed around a hot water pipe, scalding but stationary, and he held his breath through coursing dark.

The universe righted itself in noon brilliance. Caleb doubled over on the deck, coughing up sweet water. The sky spread blue above. He blinked at the fierce sun.

For months he knelt, years, gathering the pieces of his mind into a working whole. When he looked up, he saw the knotted pipes and wires in tangled disarray, Allesandre limp at their heart. Wire circled her head like a crown, and her neck like a collar. It was difficult to tell where she ended and the machines began—metal slipped smoothly beneath her skin.

Corpses lay on the floor, flood-tossed against consoles and raised altars. Two Wardens had fallen overboard, and Four and Eight were lowering ropes to rescue them.

The torrent had not moved Mal, who crossed her arms and canted her head to one side like a governess regarding a troublesome child. She walked forward. Her legs trembled with each determined step.

Allesandre looked up. Her face was Quechal dark, Caleb’s own color, and her hair streaked red. Ruined, she resembled the woman she had been months ago, the woman who ushered him into the burning foundations of the world. Her chest heaved. Her mouth was slack and her eyes set, exhausted and defiant.

“Mal,” she said so soft that Caleb barely heard: desperate, despairing. “What now?”

Mal did not answer. One hand rose to the hollow above her heart, and twisted. The sun dimmed, and above the wind and the waves’ soft roll, Caleb heard a sound like cloth being torn. Mal drew her hand from her breast, and she held a sliver of nightmare in the shape of a knife. She raised the blade.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Mal,” Allesandre repeated. “How did we get here?”

Mal moved her knife in a smooth arc that began on one side of Allesandre’s neck, and ended on the other. Allie’s eyes went soft, and she slumped forward with a wet gasp. The wires would not let her fall. Blood unfurled from her throat down her shredded blouse. She blinked once, and mouthed a word Caleb could not hear—it might have been Mal’s name, again. Pain twisted her, and she died.

Mal stood like a lightning-struck magisterium tree: solid to the eye, but the leaves and furthest branches quivered as the trunk fought to stand. The tremors traveled inward from her fingertips, and when they reached her shoulders she collapsed, curled over her knees, head down. The nightmare-knife vanished. Blood fell to the deck and mixed with water.

Caleb moved to her side and stopped, uncertain. Mal collapsed was more fearsome than Mal girded for war. He had staked his soul on games of chance, confronted the King in Red, jumped off buildings into empty space. Kneeling beside her and placing his hand on her shoulder was the hardest thing he had ever done.

He wondered if she had killed before, and wondered, as he had last night, what he would have felt if their situations were reversed, leaving him with the knife and her to watch. Alessandre was dangerous. He tried to think of Dresediel Lex dying of thirst, tried to justify the blood at his feet, and could not.

Sixty years ago, his father stood atop the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. As cantors sang, he raised his knife. It glinted black in the sun. The obsidian edge reflected the naked sacrifice. The blade fell, the murder was done, and that, too, had saved the city.

Silent, he stared into the dead woman’s eyes. But for the blood, she might have been lost in thought, or prayer.

His hand hurt. Mal had gripped it, hard. After a while, when she stopped trembling, she looked up.

“That was worse than I thought,” she said.

A distant lake bird called.

She tried to speak but choked, and stopped, and tried again. “Come on. Let’s get this place running.”

27

Caleb left Mal alone as she worked. He lacked enough Craft to help her, and she seemed happier without him. No. Not happier, exactly. She worked in a brittle silence that he feared to break.

The Wardens cased the scene. Four and Six draped the corpses in evidence shrouds, capturing pictures of each victim for later analysis. Three’s thigh was broken in the battle, and he rested next to twitching, unquiet One, whom Allie had trapped in a recursive nightmare. Four said she would wake soon. “If not, we have people who can bring her to her mind again.”

Seven walked around the station at a measured pace, forming detailed memories that specialists in Dresediel Lex would retrieve.

Couatl flew above. Four’s green-crested mount swallowed an unwary lake bird in a single bite. Feathers drifted down on the breeze.

Allesandre hung from her wire crèche.

Caleb followed Seven, listening to his footsteps and the water. Broken glass glinted at his feet. Kneeling, he lifted a shard and threw it into the lake. It disappeared in reflected brilliance. Light pinned him down and made even his shadow feel small.

He turned back to Mal, who was stripping cables from Allesandre’s skin. He approached her, but she didn’t look up. “Are you okay?”

She stopped, mid-incision. Blood sizzled on her knife. “What do you think? Go kill a friend and tell me how you feel after.”

“I’m sorry.”

She kept working as if she hadn’t heard him.

“I’d like to help. But I don’t know how.”

She didn’t respond, so he shrugged, grabbed one of the wires at her feet, and closed his eyes. A brilliant network charged the blackness, extending from the station in all directions: the system that pumped and treated Seven Leaf water, and sent it south to Dresediel Lex.

The web was sick. Thick threads hung limp; slender strands knotted and tangled. The wire twisted in his grip like a living thing. He reached for a loose thread and pulled it tight.

Seven Leaf Station convulsed. Mal swore, Couatl roared, and Caleb’s eyes snapped open. The Wardens had drawn their weapons and faced the lake, as if they expected a host of Scorpionkind to rise from its depths.

Mal grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Helping, I thought.”

“Allie almost destroyed this place. Pull the wrong thread and everything might unravel. We could sink. Or the spirits bound in the lake could break their chains.”

He released the wire. Its falling tip scraped the deck.

“Good. Thank you.”

“Is there any way I can help?”

“Well,” she said, softly, considering. “Pick up that wire again, and close your eyes.”

The web hung in darkness. She touched his shoulder. “See the red lines?”

Faint solar afterimages shadowed the blue and silver strands. “I do.”

“Those threads tie the station to the Serpents back in DL. Without them, we’ll have to spend another week rebuilding the local generators. Using the Serpents, we’ll have water flowing in a few days at most. Help me link them to the system.”

“How?”

“Touch one of the red lines, first—only one.”

With his free hand, Caleb clutched the nearest line. Fire shot up his arm, crisping nerves, singeing muscle.

Mal caught him as he stumbled. “You’ll get the hang of it,” she said as he recovered his balance. “You’re not being damaged; your soul’s just reacting to the Craft. All you need to do is merge the red lines with the blue.”

He grabbed another thread, and this time he was ready for the pain. When he touched the red line to the blue he felt a movement in his heart like shuffling cards as the two strands melded into one.

He opened his eyes. The wire he held was the same color, the same weight, but something had changed about the way it gathered and reflected light.

“That’s it,” Mal said. She examined the wire. “Do the same wherever you see a red and a blue line twinned. You’ll save me a day at least. I’ll focus on the hard stuff.”

She turned to a tangle of bent metal, closed her eyes and furrowed her brow.

He left her to her work, and went about his own.

They paused for a brief lunch around three. Sweat soaked Caleb’s shirt. Mal had discarded her jacket and rolled up her sleeves; her arms quivered as she lifted the canteen to her lips. She tore her meat with her teeth. They ate without speaking. When Caleb was only half-finished with his lunch, she stalked back to work.

Later he remembered that afternoon as a series of images, mostly of Mal: she knelt atop a Craft circle cut into the steel platform with the blade of her knife. She stripped Allesandre’s body from the web, cleaned the wires of blood and meat, and replaced the dead woman with a cold iron ring. She leaned against a console, shaking. A handkerchief tied over her hair kept sweat from her eyes.

Sunburnt, exhausted, five hours later, they stepped back to examine their handiwork. The station was clear of human refuse, and Allesandre’s web re-strung. Smashed crystal screens stared from control kiosks. Gears and levers, frayed wires and mystic diagrams protruded from broken panels. But when Mal said, “That’s it,” Caleb did not challenge her.

The setting sun cast the station’s shadow long upon the water, and their shadows with it: the Wardens, Caleb, and Mal.

“It’s working?” Caleb asked—the first words he had spoken since lunch.

“No.” She moved her hand in a swift circle. “Now it’s working.”

At first, nothing seemed to change: a stretching, still span in which he wondered if Mal had fixed the station at all, or if she had snapped when Allesandre died, and spent the afternoon drawing ineffectual lines in metal. He waited in silence. Four’s feet scuffed the deck as she shifted. Caleb slid his hands into his pockets, and the sound of fabric on skin was louder than the waves.

Louder, because there were no waves.

The waters of Seven Leaf Lake lay flat and even as a pane of glass from horizon to horizon, reflecting the universe aflame with sunset. Caleb’s breath stopped. The slightest exhalation might shatter this perfect mirror of the world, and with that mirror the world itself.

Then the screams began.

At first he felt them in his stomach, but they rose in volume and pitch to fill his ears, the insensate fury of a Skittersill mob, rage so strong it broke into despair. The screams came from nowhere and everywhere at once, rising to crescendo as the sun fell.

Mal’s arms remained outstretched. The Wardens did not move. They stood sentinel.

The setting sun spilled its blood on the water. Night crept in from the edges of the world. The first stars appeared, puncture wounds in the sky from which darkness spread. Glyphs burned at Mal’s wrists, around her fingers, beneath her collar.

Caleb felt the screams in his teeth.

When the sky deepened to the rich purple of a king’s robe, he saw light in the lake.

Phosphorescent fish, he thought, or invisible creatures too tiny to be seen. In deep caves, as a child, one of his mother’s native guides had shown him underground eels, skin slick with green radiance.

He was wrong.

Gods writhed in the water.

Starlight sank into Seven Leaf Lake and branched into rippling, multicolored thorns. Figures thrashed, impaled upon the light: humans, deer, wolves, snakes, mice, great-winged birds, Scorpionkind, all wriggling like caught fish. The smallest was three times the size of Seven Leaf Station.

The screams came from their open mouths.

He remembered, back in Dresediel Lex, telling the King in Red that the local spirits of Seven Leaf Lake had been subdued. He said this without emotion, because that was how it was written in the report.

Caleb’s knees struck the metal deck. His hands rose to block his ears, but he forced them down, and forced his eyes open. He had been to Bay Station, had seen gods entombed and tortured. These were nowhere near so grand: remnant spirits, that was all, lesser deities that grew with the tribes that once roamed these mountains. When the tribes died or moved on, their gods remained, living off scraps of wonder and remembrance, barely conscious.

Conscious enough, though, to realize when someone came to take their land, their water. Conscious enough to fight. Conscious enough to be a threat—and Dresediel Lex would tolerate no threats.

Mal clapped her hands twice. Machines clanked and Craft hummed its sphere-music. A curtain of water, reflective as mercury, curved over Caleb and Mal, the Wardens and Seven Leaf Station, blocking their view of the lake and the tortured beings within. Above, the water closed the sky in a shrinking circle, a hundred feet in diameter, fifty, twenty-five. A red star gleamed in the circle’s center.

The circle closed, and cut off the cries like a guillotine blade. The water blocked out moonlight, stars, sky, and lake, and cast the station in a bloodless light. The air smelled of rain and burnt metal.

Caleb realized he was still kneeling. He stood, using a nearby chair as a prop. Beside him, Mal sagged.

“Those are gods,” Caleb said. “They’re in pain.”

“They’re not gods. Not exactly. And when someone comes to salve the world’s pain, those things can take a number like the rest of us. Meanwhile, Skittersill and Sansilva and Stonewood and North Ridge and Central and the Vale will have water to drink.” She turned a wheel on a nearby altar, and a hatch telescoped open in the floor, revealing a flight of stairs down into the station. “I’m going to bed.” She took the first and second steps slow, but on the third her strength failed her and she steadied herself against the wall. “You should get some rest.”

She descended out of sight. A closing door cut off the tap of her footsteps. Caleb remained, alone, on deck with the Wardens. For a while, he watched his own reflection distorted in the water, and listened. He heard nothing. He was used to that.

He followed Mal into darkness.

28

Seven Leaf Station was not designed for comfort. Below the surface, between banks of slowly revolving Craft circles and humming soul catchers, Heartstone architects had added as an afterthought a few bare rooms for the station’s staff. The Wardens split four chambers among themselves. Caleb chose a cold bed in a room with a writing desk, a few pictures of a dead man’s family, and a chessboard set with a problem involving knight moves. He glanced at the board but didn’t mull over the problem. He had enough of his own.

Troubled by the thought of sleeping in a corpse’s sweat, Caleb stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens. He lay down to rest, but sleep evaded him. He saw blood and water flow from a cut throat, surging in time to the beat of the machines that drained the lake.

He stood at last, slipped on his shoes and jacket, and left the room with the chess problem still unsolved. Turning through a maze of corridors he found the Wardens’ larder; he poured a cold glass of water, assembled a plate of rice and meat and tortillas, and bore them back into the twisting halls.

There was no mystery as to where Mal slept. When Caleb and the Wardens followed her into the under-station, they found all the doors open save one, marked “Manager’s Quarters” in thick block letters.

The door was still closed. He knocked, waited, and heard her muted by steel: “Go away.”

“I brought you food. You didn’t come to dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“It’s not for your sake. What if we hit bad weather on the way back and I’m thrown out of the basket? I want you strong enough to catch me.”

“Who says I would catch you?”

He opened the door and stepped inside.

The manager’s suite was larger than the other rooms, but still small. It smelled faintly of incense, and contained an overstuffed bookcase, a desk, a nightstand, and a large bed.

The far wall was transparent. Beyond it writhed the gods impaled on thorn-tree contracts, larger underwater than they had seemed from the surface. Currents and passing fish distorted their features. Their cries did not penetrate the walls.

Mal sat in silhouette, cross-legged on the bed with her back to Caleb. She was naked from the waist up, the curves of her neck and ribs and the swell of her hip lit blue and green and red by light from the window. As he entered, she lifted her shirt from the bed and slid it on, one arm at a time, without hurry. She fastened one button at her breast, but did not look back at him. “I thought I told you to stay out.”

“You didn’t. You told me to go away.”

“And you listened so well.” She set a slender object down on the nightstand. In the dim light he could not tell what it was.

“I’m a good listener.” He set the plate of food on the desk, turned the desk chair to face her, and sat, watching her back.

She seemed so still, a statue in contrast with the fluid pain beyond the window. He focused on her outline.

“Allie was a colleague,” she said. “She left for Seven Leaf soon after the Bright Mirror thing. This would be her big break into management. She wrote me, at first. Her letters stopped coming a month ago, but I was too busy to check.”

“It must have been hard for her,” he said, “so far away, no friends.”

“Nothing but the work, and what work.” Mal waved at the water and the things inside it. “Subdue these spirits, torment them. Even if they aren’t conscious the way we are, they feel.”

“It’s worth the price,” he said, though he was not certain.

“For how long?” Her voice was hollow. “Ten years from now, or twenty, this lake will be a dry and cracked bowl in the mountains and we will turn to the next, and the next after that. One day it won’t be mindless gods who suffer for our thirst, but other cities, other people. How long until we decide Regis doesn’t need its wealth of water? The cities of the frozen north, surely they don’t thirst like we do. Shikaw, next. We could drink this continent dry, from the Pax to the World Sea. Water is life, and life is worth any price, even life itself.”

He didn’t say anything.

She sighed. In the depths of Seven Leaf Lake, the trapped gods screamed. “This is the world we live in.”

“Why not try to fix things?” Even as he said the words they felt small. A broken window or a broken promise you could fix. The scene in the lake was beyond fixing.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

She laughed, a sour, sad sound that hung on the station’s dead air like a corpse on a rack. “Everybody needs to make a sacrifice sooner or later, to survive. I guess this was my first—or the first one to hit me so close. I prepared for this moment years ago. I told myself I had.”

He didn’t ask what “this moment” was. In the flickering light, he could barely recognize Mal. Maybe she couldn’t recognize herself. He moved to the bed, which gave slightly under his weight. The mattress was a firm lie: the world beneath was only water. He slid next to her and touched her shoulders. Her muscles were knotted steel cables. He pressed into those knots with his thumbs and the heels of his hands. Mal stifled a cry as he began. He tried again, with a lighter touch. “Thank you,” she said this time.

The cropped fringe of her hair feathered against his fingers. Small, downy hairs trailed down the nape of her neck, an arrow pointing to her back and shoulders. He had expected her skin to be cool to the touch. Everything down here was. She was warm though, feverish.

So close, he studied her: smooth skin a shade lighter than his own, shoulders and neck dark and freckled by sun. He could not feel her glyph-marks—the Craft left no scars, unless you knew how to look for them.

He studied her to capture her, to capture the moment, but also to distract himself from the tortures outside the window. Why would she choose to face that? Maybe she felt it was a part of her sacrifice, or Allesandre’s. He pressed against her skin, and thoughts of sacrifice faded. He worked her shoulders until the steel melted and became almost human.

Sitting on Mal’s bed, massaging her back, Caleb felt time stretch and transform. This moment was a door ajar.

He leaned into her, silent, and she leaned into him. His arms drifted around her. Mal’s breath fluttered like wings. The tips of his fingers explored her jaw and throat, the slim even lines of muscle and the gently pulsing vein. She clutched his arms. He felt the line of her collarbone, the skin above the swell of her breasts.

It was wet. In surprise he lifted his hand from her and held it up to the light of tortured gods. His fingertips glistened dark and red.

Later he could not recall whether he recoiled from her, or she from him. One of them moved, or both, and seconds later she sat a foot away from him on the bed, in profile like a temple statue. Beneath the open collar of her shirt ran two long cuts, one on the left side and one on the right. Other cuts, long healed, lay below them, parallel to her collarbone: a necklace of scars. Her eyes glittered.

“Mal. What the hells, Mal.” The object she had placed on the nightstand was a knife—not the Craftwork blade that killed Allesandre, but a length of black glass with a handle of beaten gold and silver wire.

The half of her that faced him was in shadow. The half that faced the gods reflected the bitter green glow of their pain.

Behind her, on the windowsill, sat a stone carving, three inches tall and no broader than a woman’s arm: a hollow cylinder formed by the bodies of two serpents intertwined. Twin trails of thin gray smoke wisped from a coil of incense at the idol’s center. Rising, the wisps wound around each other and faded into air.

“It’s called—” she began.

“I know what it’s called,” Caleb said before she could finish. “Autosacrifice. Bloodletting. Cutting.”

“It’s not cutting.”

“What’s the difference?”

She wiped the blood with a handkerchief, folded the handkerchief and set it beside the knife. “I told you to leave.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Hells, Caleb. You saw what I did up there. You see what’s happening outside. I need to atone.”

“Atone?” The bed shook with the force of his standing. He reached around her and grabbed the idol off the windowsill, leaving the incense and its excrement of ash behind. “Aquel and Achal.” He threw the statue onto the mattress beside her. It bounced, and rolled to rest with Aquel facing down and Achal snarling up. “These are bloodthirsty creatures. We have them locked up, and I’m glad for it. We killed people for them. Cutting yourself before that statue—do you know what it stands for?”

“Of course I do!” Metal walls reflected the force of her shout. Caleb stepped back. She stood, her half-open shirt flaring like the robes of a Deathless King. “The priests killed. Sure. But are we any different? Am I, after what I did today? You’ve seen Skittersill, and Stonewood, what our city does to the people who lose. Your father—”

“Don’t bring him into this. My father’s a criminal. A madman.”

“Your father led the Skittersill Rising! He tried for years to make peace between theists and Craftsmen, and when that failed he tried to protest. And they rained fire on him. They burned his followers by the hundreds.”

“He wanted to kill people. That’s the freedom they were fighting for, him and his followers. Freedom to kill people.”

“Freedom from persecution. Freedom to practice their religion. Freedom to sacrifice volunteers—people who wanted to die.”

“That’s murder! It’s murder when you carve someone’s heart out of their chest, no matter if you’re doing it because a god tells you to.”

Muscles on the side of her jaw twitched. “Fine. But what I just did was murder, too. When we sin, we shed blood to atone. That’s what my parents taught me.”

“Then they were crazy.”

He said the words before he knew them: they sprang to his mind, slithered down the spine to his lungs, infested the air, and burst out his mouth. Mal’s eyes widened, and her lips pressed thin together. Caleb opened his mouth to say something, anything, to apologize or explain.

The gods’ light faded, and it was too late.

Night filled the room. A great hand seized him, and threw him like a stone. He struck the wall, or perhaps the floor or ceiling. Directions no longer met in his mind. Weight pressed against his chest, the weight of thousands of miles of water. His ribs creaked and he fought to breathe.

“You don’t get to say that.”

She was talking. Good. Talking meant she wouldn’t kill him straight off.

Blood and silver, he thought, when did her killing me become a possibility?

He remembered her standing over him goddess-like on the border of the Skittersill. Deities kill those that follow them. He opened his mouth, but only a dry croak escaped his lips.

“My parents were good people.” Her voice was an anchor in his whirling world. “They were faithful, and they were angry, but they were good. They stood against the Red King in the Skittersill Rising, and fell. And burned. My mother took a week to die.”

He struggled against her Craft, but his arms did not move, his scars would not wake. Blood pounded in his ears. His lungs ached for air.

The Rising had been his father’s fault. When Temoc decided to walk a path, fools always followed in his footsteps. A peaceful demonstration, they claimed, and it was at first, but as weeks rolled on his control of the mob wavered. On the tenth day, some idiot threw a stone, a child died, and the Wardens moved in.

Battle lines were not drawn. There were no heroic struggles. Those who resisted, fell.

Caleb was ten. Mal could not have been more than twelve.

After the bodies cooled, the King in Red issued a public call for peace, and Temoc became an enemy of the state.

Caleb’s father had already gone, leaving his scars behind.

Caleb was also, in his way, an orphan of the Rising.

Mal’s parents lay burning in the streets in Skittersill. No amount of water could quench those flames, and their bodies would never fall to ash.

Mal, too, took power from her scars.

“I’m sorry,” he said as spots of black deeper than black swelled behind his eyes.

The weight lifted from his chest, and darkness drained away down the hole in Mal’s mind. He slumped, but though his legs felt like stretched and fraying rubber, he did not fall.

Mal stood between him and the gods, blanched and wan as a crescent moon. The draining dark had taken something from her.

“Sorry,” she said. “Yes.” And: “You should go.”

He reached blindly for the door, opened it, and backed out without looking away from her. He had to say something, but there was nothing to say.

She grew smaller as he withdrew. When he crossed the threshold of her room, she was the size of a statue. Three steps more, the size of an idol.

The door closed between them, and he turned away and ran.